Introduction
Read any textbook account of interwar Europe, and “indifference to nation” is not likely to figure as a heading. On the contrary, the talk will be of untrammeled nationalist rivalries leading the continent to ruin. In the territories of Eastern and South Eastern Europe that had once been part of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires, we will be reminded, nationalist hatred and border conflicts paved the way to World War I. And in the aftermath of that war, the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler took glorification of the national community to new heights, unleashing colonial and continental wars of conquest and annihilation. Small wonder that when many Europeans looked back from the rubble of 1945, what they saw was far too much commitment to nation, not too little. Indeed, the aspiration of many idealists in 1945 was precisely to supersede the nationalist rivalries and affiliations that they saw as so detrimental to peaceful coexistence and to create some kind of supranational European loyalty and structure instead.
Small wonder, too, that the European experience in the first half of the twentieth century and the disastrous wars that engulfed the continent led many historians to project the appeal of nationalism back into the nineteenth century, detecting nascent national movements wherever a flag was waved. But a slate of recent studies on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe offers a very different picture, one in which many of the inhabitants of the Habsburg monarchy were uncertain about their national affiliation and indifferent to the overtures of nationalist “entrepreneurs.”Footnote 1 Thus, this article starts with a conundrum. If, until World War I, the peoples of the Habsburg territories, accustomed to the ways of the “empire,”Footnote 2 had been so indifferent to the idea of nation, how did the lenses through which they viewed themselves in relation to the world around them change in an age in which the national community became the legitimate unit of statehood? If “indifference to nation” implies not so much a fixed quality in attitude and behavior but is rather a relative term capturing the fact that the population fell short of activists' wishes, is it possible that this lag continued into the interwar period? This seems to be the implication of a recent article by Tara Zahra. Acknowledging the need to historicize the forms not only of national allegiance, but also of indifference to nationalist appeals, Zahra argues that a good level of apathy and evasion persisted well into the twentieth century.Footnote 3 Did the very radicalism of interwar nationalism in fact reveal a recognition among hypernationalists that national affiliation continued to be fragile and shallow?
This article does indeed argue for the continued existence of a gap between activist aspirations and popular identities, but it goes further. For if indifference did persist, the argument here is that it could do so only in modified and sometimes paradoxical form. After all, following the great empires' collapse, most European citizens' lives were necessarily now defined by the existence of national structures and movements. If we want to identify what work, in this new context, “indifference” as a category of analysis might perform, we will need to think about what “nation” meant to formerly indifferent or uncertain people confronted with new political configurations centered precisely around nation-states.
The new Italian province of South Tirol, and particularly its Italian-speaking population, offers a particularly interesting region for such an enquiry. This was a linguistically mixed territory that, until the end of World War I, was an integral part of the crownland Tirol under Habsburg rule, and one in which until the outbreak of war the population did not think of itself predominantly in national terms. Yet having passed into the hands of the Italian state in 1918, and thus within a few years falling under Fascist rule, the region, now referred to as the Alto Adige,Footnote 4 was subject to some of interwar Europe's most intensely nationalist agitation. As a hypernationalist movement, Fascism sought to create a national community fully committed to the idea of national unity and greatness. How did this aggressively promoted national consciousness resonate in the former Habsburg territory? How did the population respond when the new rulers' hypernationalist thrust made “indifference” seemingly untenable? Did the region's Italian-speaking element, if not other parts of the population, develop a national sentiment to match that promoted by the hypernationalist political elite? Could both leadership and people join in celebrating the claims of the Italian nation?
Precisely because of this combination of borderland status and intense agitation, South Tirol also offers an interesting example to test two very different readings of the power and cohesion of Italian national identity under Fascism. In recent years, a substantial though not uncontested body of scholarship has argued that in staging the nation as worthy of spiritual devotion, the cultural politics of the Fascist regime succeeded in harnessing the enthusiasm of the Italian population and promoting a new sense of national selfhood.Footnote 5 Such interpretations posit a consensus between regime and people and a shared understanding of national identification and belonging.Footnote 6 On the other hand, there is a long-standing tradition in Italian scholarly and popular discourse that Italy has always lacked a sense of national affiliation, that Italians keep having to be “made,” and that despite their obsession in doing so the Fascists failed miserably at the task.Footnote 7 This way of thinking brands Italians of all times, right up to the present, as “indifferent,” and nowhere might this be expected to be more the case than in newly acquired borderlands with a long “pre-Italian” heritage.
To test these two readings, this article focuses on the population that should have gained most out of national assertiveness, namely Italian speakers in the province. The Italian speakers represented the new power and, where they were recent immigrants, had often been dispatched with the specific purpose of “Italianizing” a territory inhabited by German speakers. The article traces some of the everyday ways in which the few native and the many immigrant Italian speakers conceptualized national belonging under Fascist rule. The article will argue that, even among this group, indifference to nation did indeed live on. Yet it did so encoded in nationalist language, revealing the regime's ability to force the population to speak and act in the name of Italy, even if speaking of Italy often became a trump card in long-established regional and social rivalries (and even though the regime exacerbated such rivalries and raised the stakes of their outcome). Moreover, by creating new hierarchies of Italian-ness, the Fascists at times paradoxically inverted the relationship between nationalist activists and indifferent people, forcing individuals and groups to present themselves as nationalist champions in order to persuade an “indifferent” regime to support their claims.
Indifference to Nation in the Tirol before and after World War I
The notion of “indifference to nation” under Habsburg rule certainly captures prewar allegiances and group relations in Tirol, inhabited as it was by speakers of different languages—German, Italian, and Ladin. Though the “language frontier” was more clear-cut than in other territories of the monarchy, with Italian speakers predominantly inhabiting the southern-most part of the Tirol, the Trentino, there were some linguistically mixed areas. Moreover, seasonal migration, with Italian speakers from the Trentino and the bordering Italian provinces seeking work in the German-speaking areas of the Tirol, had engendered greater interaction between the linguistic communities, albeit generally not on equal terms. Among the stable Tirolean population, migrant laborers and their traditional labor stints north had given rise to an image of the Italian as a poor, unattached vagrant laborer without Heimat.Footnote 8
What predominantly defined allegiances in the Crownland prior to World War I were not nationalist affiliations surrounding the prospect of a united Italy or a greater Germany. What mattered, even among many Italian speakers, was the loyalty to “Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland”—the allegiance to the Kaiserreich, the emperor, the imperial army, the Catholic Church—couched in terms of devotion to the “holy land Tirol.”Footnote 9 Indeed, what the population cherished was the unity of Tirol and its cultural and political heritage. Nationalists on both sides, Italian and German, worked tirelessly to overcome this “indifference to nation,” this impassiveness or even defiance toward a novel form of allegiance, and to turn Tiroleans into ardent believers in the nationalist cause.Footnote 10 Italian irredentists, for example, aspired to the integration of Tirol's southern-most part, the Italian-speaking Trentino, into the Italian nation-state. Some went further and advocated the annexation of the entire Tirolean territory south of the Alpine watershed, which they claimed represented Italy's “natural” geographic border to the north. Such a claim would also have brought many German and Ladin speakers under Italian sovereignty.
The aftermath of World War I brought precisely that, the division of Tirol and the annexation of the southern parts, the Trentino and South Tirol, to Italy. Most inhabitants of the region did not approve of the division, though it was certainly better received in the predominantly Italian-speaking Trentino than among the mostly German speakers of South Tirol.
Initially, the new Italian citizens were promised freedom of cultural and linguistic expression, with national assimilation limited to the administrative integration of the territory. But with Fascism in power soon after the annexation, the project of effectively incorporating the region into the Italian nation moved beyond mere administrative control to encompass the “Italianization” of land and people.Footnote 11 Policies aimed at settling Italians in the borderland were combined with efforts at Italianizing the native German-speaking population, referred to as the allogeni, the “native but foreign.” The term “allogeni” indeed deserves some closer examination, as it dissociated native people from the land they inhabited.Footnote 12 In the nationalist mental framework, the German speakers of South Tirol were regarded as native but at the same time considered foreign to the land, which was now coded as Italian in geographical (based on the Alpine watershed), as well as historical terms (based on the identification between Fascist Italy and Ancient Rome). The perceived incongruity between people and land and the concomitant ambivalence about how to relate one with the other, whether to assimilate the allogeni or replace them with Italian immigrants, defined Fascist rule in the northern borderland throughout the interwar period. A final resolution of the South Tirolean population's “uncertain” nationality was attempted through an agreement between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1939. Under this agreement, the allogeni would choose whether to stay and finally “become” Italian (whatever that may have meant) or to move “Heim ins Reich,” “home” to Germany.Footnote 13 Under the insistent pressure of Nazi propaganda, and having experienced the unrelenting efforts of the Fascists at Italianization, a great majority opted to leave for Germany, though the war intervened and prevented most from doing so.Footnote 14
Concrete steps aiming at turning the South Tiroleans, Italian by citizenship, into “true” Italians started soon after the Fascist rise to power. Beginning in 1923, mandatory schooling was imparted exclusively in Italian. Other steps included the transfer of South Tirolean civil servants to other Italian provinces, the pronouncement of Italian as the only public language in 1924, and the prohibition of German associations and publications.Footnote 15 As late as 1928, however, a report about the situation in South Tirol suggested that the nationalist push to turn the allogeni into Italians continued to have only moderate resonance among much of the population. The report, addressed to the Minister of the Interior, Mussolini, by the leader of the new Fascist farmers' association, described the native population of South Tirol as employed mainly in agriculture, with a small commercial and professional middle class concentrated in the few towns. After offering an accurate description of the socioeconomic makeup of the province, the report went on to describe the mass of the population as “good and quiet,” as not demanding “anything else but to be left in peace, and to be treated with benevolence and aided in its most immediate needs.”Footnote 16 The report thus stamped the mass of the population as indifferent to both nationalist issues and political questions.
Not that the Italian authorities denied the presence of nationalist stirrings among the native German-speaking population. They recognized it in the “anti-Italianism” of nationalist agitators and suspected many in the German-speaking clergy of abusing their position of authority to mobilize the native population against Italianization. Other nationalist entrepreneurs were identified among the members of cultural associations and sports clubs, which supposedly harbored both “austriacanti,” those wishing for an annexation of South Tirol to Austria, and “pangermanisiti,” who hoped for a greater Germany that would include South Tirol. Although the Italian authorities differentiated between those in favor of Austria and those in favor of a greater Germany, they recognized that both were united in their opposition to the Italian state's sovereignty over South Tirol.
Fascist bureaucrats thus painted a picture consonant with recent descriptions of the late Habsburg monarchy: a mass indifferent to nation and a few leaders intent on changing this, with the important difference that historians such as Tara Zahra and Jeremy King would characterize the population not as simply apolitical and parochial, as the Fascists did, but rather as actively rejecting particular political or national identifications. Ultimately, it was precisely this indifference, this obtuseness, this disregard for an imposed language and culture, and the resulting uncertainty among the Fascist authorities about the allegiances of this new border region that forced them to define the boundaries of the national community more stringently. The nationalist push would eventually have an effect on the German speakers of South Tirol—but not the one desired by the Fascists.
By the mid 1930s, in fact, Fascist leaders could no longer refer to the population as “indifferent.” Nationalist allegiance and activism had become more pronounced not only on the Italian, but also on the German side. As the regime stepped up its efforts to “penetrate” the German-speaking South Tiroleans, the latter, supported by nationalist associations and parties in Austria and Germany, increasingly opted to take on a German identity. In this context of nationalist rivalry and competition, there were many situations in which “indifference” was barely an option. Yet even in the 1930s, claims of national allegiance cannot simply be taken at face value. Instead, we need to look more closely at the aspirations, interests, and other concerns that both prompted and modified those claims, and the context in which they were made.Footnote 17
Focusing on the Italian rather than the German side, the remainder of this article analyzes the changing allegiances and identities specifically of the Italian speakers in the province for whom “Italian-ness” supposedly became a crucial common denominator. As we will see, national affiliations would continue to be very far from uniform. For the Italians, nation popped up in different instances, with different meanings, supporting different claims, and, as we will also see, by no means always in opposition to the German-speaking population. In fact, we find the same gap between activist proclamations and popular behaviors that characterized the earlier period—with both leaders and population having moved several notches over in a nationalist direction to adapt to the new parameters of nationalist competition and aggression.
Italians from the Trentino, Italians from the “Old Provinces,” and the Question of “Real” Italian-ness
The Trentino had been a poor region, poorer than South Tirol to its north. After the annexation, people from the Trentino increasingly sought opportunities in South Tirol, not just as sharecroppers and day laborers, but also as civil servants, teachers, Fascist militia members, and entrepreneurs. In many respects, they were the ideal representatives of the Italian state. Because many of them knew both the Italian and the German language and customs, they could act as a bridge between the German-speaking South Tiroleans and the new Italian authorities. They were, moreover, familiar with the old Habsburg administration and could thus facilitate the transition into a new, Italian one. Yet the Fascist authorities did not always welcome the presence of these Italian speakers from the Trentino.
For our purposes, this is a first hint that in the Italian Fascist context (and no doubt in other national contexts, too), telling the story of popular indifference to elite nation-building is complicated by the state's own ambivalent attitude toward substantial sections of the population. To gauge popular responses, it is vital to understand that the Fascist authorities themselves were divided on what “Italian-ness” meant and how it should be strengthened in the province. The leadership's conceptions of nationhood were far from straightforward, and the Italianization policies of the regime displayed fluctuating priorities and unstable hierarchies of Italian-ness. Unsurprisingly, the complexity of the regime's stance elicited a variety of responses, challenges, and adaptations not only from the population, but also from local state representatives. This inconsistency only reinforced a central lesson for the population in the interwar period, namely that Fascist rule no longer allowed indifference to nation per se but rather encouraged a piecemeal and opportunistic deployment of nationalist claims and language. Indeed, at times, it was the regime that was “indifferent” with the population eager to assert national prerogatives the rulers themselves were keen to deny.
Initially, the Trentino and South Tirol were annexed as one single province into the Italian state, but in January 1927, the region was separated into two distinct provinces. In a letter to Prefect Umberto Ricci, the highest state representative in the newly minted province of Bolzano, Mussolini explained that the “trentinismo,” the excessive regionalism of the Trentini, the Italians-speaking population of the Trentino, had harmed the attempted Italianization of the borderland. Its division into two provinces, the province of Trent and that of Bolzano, had become necessary because “the ‘trentinismo’ was pursued with the intent of reversing the positions of the prewar period, of doing to the Germans of the Alto Adige as they had done to the Trentini, thus maintaining a state of tension between the populations.”Footnote 18 Mussolini was here referring to the former sense of repression that Italian nationalists of the Trentino had experienced at the hands of the German-speaking majority in Habsburg Tirol. Entrenched in a nationalist mentality, Mussolini assumed that in a mixed region, one side would of necessity oppress the other. It was nonetheless a remarkable comment that the head of state would suggest that the creation of a separate province would spare the German speakers, now a minority, from retribution at the hands of the new Italian-speaking majority. In practice, however, the division meant that the Italianization of the newly created province of Bolzano could now more directly be orchestrated from Rome, rather than locally from Trent. In that same letter, Mussolini stated that the overall goal for the Alto Adige was:
to push the Italianization of the region to the utmost, and to thereby profoundly and enduringly alter its physical, political, moral, demographic character; in other words to substitute, or at least to intermingle, the current German majority with an Italian majority, or a very strong minority, which strips the region of its present, predominantly German character. The point is not to transform the current Germans into many Italians; on the contrary, the point is a) to maximize the number of the Italians and b) to give the new generations an Italian imprint, which can be achieved through schooling.Footnote 19
Doubtful of the possibility of transforming adults, Mussolini advocated a two-pronged assault involving educating and remolding young South Tiroleans while at the same time pushing for immigration to the province from the rest of Italy. Now that the newly annexed borderland had been divided and the goal of thoroughly altering its demographic makeup outlined, the ideal emissaries of the Italian nation had to be dispatched. To what extent the Italian speakers from the Trentino, who according to Mussolini had actually harmed the previous Italianization effort with their staunch regionalism, were supposed to participate in this effort was a contested question. Recognizing an opportunity to improve their life prospects, many Trentini were eager to overcome the widespread suspicion that they were not really Italian, that they were indeed indifferent, and possibly even opposed, to the Italian nation, and portrayed themselves as “real Italians,” on a par with the Italians from the “old provinces,” which had belonged to the Italian kingdom since prior to the Great War.Footnote 20
Rejecting Mussolini's suspicions, the prefect who succeeded Ricci in 1928 supported the Trentini. In 1929, Giovanni Battista Marziali informed the central administration in Rome about a slate of new public works projects “which, like all other works in the province, would give preference to laborers from the province of Trent.”Footnote 21 But a few years later, Marziali, too, changed his stance and expressed his irritation at the heavy contingent of Trentini in South Tirol. Teachers, the forefront in the Italianization effort, had responded to the call for applications for jobs in South Tirol, but as Marziali reported:
they are almost all from the province of Trent and this does not enthuse me at all because there are already too many Trentini in the province of Bolzano. Apart from a few Exceptions, it is all too well known that they are not always the best messengers of pure Italian-ness and of a spirit of comprehension toward the allogeni. The reason is that the allogeni and the Trentini are predisposed against each other because of prewar rancor.Footnote 22
Echoing Mussolini's earlier assessment, now Prefect Marziali saw the Trentini as seeking to take advantage of the reversal of the prewar balance of power and impose themselves on the allogeni. Yet this explanation of tensions between South Tiroleans and Trentini seems to have acted as a convenient foil, allowing commentators to use the Trentini as scapegoats for the failures of Italianization in South Tirol. The conflict between the German speakers and Italian nationalists and Fascists could in this way be recast as simple regional animosity.
The Trentini fought back against such maligning of their national loyalties. As late as 1935, soldiers from the Trentino were removed from the service as border guards because as Trentini they were deemed “untrustworthy.” This led high functionaries from the Trentino—two members of parliament, the mayor of Trent, and the president of the provincial Legion—to complain to Mussolini that such “misinterpretations” were a common occurrence. They demanded that all ministries, as well as the authorities in the Alto Adige, be informed that “when one talks of the allogeni one talks of the Germans of the South Tyrol and from mixed-language areas…, and one has absolutely to exclude all the Italians of the Trentino who deserve to be considered equal to [those from] all other provinces.”Footnote 23 Keen to overcome the suspicion of regionalism leveled against the Trentini and enable them to reap the full benefits of “Italian-ness,” these high functionaries pointed out that the Trentini did not fall into the category “native but foreign.” The Trentini belonged fully to the national community and thus were entitled to the territory.
Yet the Trentini could not shake off a continuing mistrust on the part of many Italians from other provinces. They were accused of engaging in excessive regionalism, of practicing “campanilismo” (ringing the bells of one's own church)—that is, of congregating together—instead of participating in an open Italian community that welcomed all Italian immigrants.
But the dislike was clearly mutual. The Trentini do not seem to have particularly liked their fellow citizens either. A secret police report on the mood in the province in 1940 asserted that:
the Trentini complain they are badly off because they do not get along with the many Southerners who reside in the province of Bolzano. To the observation that they are too “campanilisti,” that they should not despise the Southerner, who on the contrary has many good qualities and among them especially that of cordiality and sincerity in friendship, they answer that it is impossible to get along with them because they are too ignorant and presumptuous, that with their manner they have ruined the Alto Adige environment.Footnote 24
The police report was not wrong. Many Trentini were indeed eager to demarcate themselves from Italians from the other provinces. Giovanni Nardini from Trento was arrested in South Tirol because he had complained about the high level of unemployment in Italy. While prophesying the arrival of the Communists (he dubbed them the “red shirts,” in allusion to the Fascist black shirts), he asserted that the “italiani” had “come up here to satisfy their hunger.”Footnote 25 Nardini himself had been arrested for fraud, perpetrated against some local peasants in the past, suggesting that he had also “satisfied his hunger” at the expense of local, most likely German-speaking, peasants. Yet that did not stop him from expressing resentment against the immigrant “Italians,” a category from which he excluded himself though he was an Italian citizen from the Italian-speaking Trentino who had himself recently moved to South Tirol.
As these police reports show, the distinction between Trentini and other Italians was not just imposed from above. One of my interviewees, Rino Canali, an Italian speaker whose family had lived for generations in the linguistically mixed area south of the provincial capital of Bolzano, painted an even more nuanced picture of social divisions than the one suggested by Nardini. Canali grew up speaking Italian at home, but he knew German as well, which he had learned upon his parents' insistence. He told me that the Trentini had come to work as sharecroppers and day laborers for the German-speaking estate owners for as long as he could remember. The “italiani,” the Italians, had arrived only with the construction of the factories in Bolzano in the mid-1930s. His account set up a clear distinction between the Italian speakers who had resided in the area prior to the region's annexation to Italy, namely his family; the Trentini, who came as day laborers from the valleys farther south; and the “italiani,” factory workers from other Italian provinces. In his universe marked by hard labor, odd jobs, and little property, the distinction between native Italian speakers, Italian immigrants, and Trentini was as important as the distinction between native Italian speakers and native German speakers—which is nowadays often the only distinction drawn when looking back at the nationalist tensions of the interwar years.
This is not to downplay the importance of the distinction between Italian- and German-speakers, a distinction on which the authorities laid ever greater emphasis in the course of the 1930s. By the early 1930s, the Italianization effort no longer aimed to transform the adult population of South Tirol or even to communicate with it. It was only the younger generation that the regime hoped to educate in the “Italian spirit”—a spirit supposedly more readily to be found among Italians from the old provinces than among the Trentini. The interaction between German and Italian speakers, facilitated by the Trentini who knew German, came to be viewed increasingly as pointless, and indeed harmful, to the project of Italianization. When he demanded the transfer of teachers from the “old provinces of central and southern Italy,” Prefect Marziali added that “the knowledge of the German language was not indispensable.”Footnote 26 When the three functionaries from the Trentino tried to defend the reputation of the Trentini, they distinguished them from the German speakers in the province and thus implicitly agreed that the latter could not be trusted.
In the second half of the 1930s, the idea increasingly took hold among some members of the Fascist elite that the South Tiroleans would not and could not become Italian, that they should ideally be replaced by Italian immigrants, and that these immigrants should not mingle with the German speakers. This was all the more true once the Option agreement between Italy and Germany in 1939 proposed the departure of the German speakers and the complete homogenization of the region as Italian. The alliance between Italy and Germany demanded that any possible tension over South Tirol be resolved. Though in theory the region should have been one of the “German” lands Hitler was committed to integrating into the Reich, in light of the Axis alliance, the dictators agreed that Italy would keep the land, and Germany would get the people. The region's German speakers were forced to declare their intent to either stay (and Italianize) or leave for Germany (and retain language and culture).
In this context, interaction between Italians and those Germans opting to leave (in some valleys, the great majority) was seen as detrimental—and this in spite of the celebrated Italo-German friendship. What is interesting, however, is that those Italians who failed to adhere to this social code were again seen as lacking appropriate “national sentiments.” Mario Cucco from the Trentino was employed by the national railroad company and stationed in a small village in South Tirol. Because he “maintained very friendly relations with German speakers who had decided to emigrate,” he was deemed of “dubious Italian sentiments” and encouraged to “clarify his intentions with respect to nationality.”Footnote 27 Cucco was a member of the Fascist Party, but the police report accused him of never wearing a uniform, never attending meetings, and never participating in Italian activities. He was supposedly not socializing much with the Italians from the old provinces. Being from the Trentino and being a party member was clearly not enough to be considered “Italian.” One's friends, those with whom one socialized, mattered greatly.
By 1940, when Cucco's “Italian-ness” was called into question, Italy and Germany had been allied for years, and Italy had just entered the war on Germany's side. Among the Italians in South Tirol (and other northern provinces), though, the alliance with Germany was unpopular. In South Tirol, there could be no “fraternizing” between the two peoples, not even in light of the Italo-German alliance. On the contrary, on a regional level, the alliance had created an even greater antagonism, which played itself out in the implementation of the Option agreement.
The historiography of South Tirol has described the Option as a solution of last resort, almost an admission of defeat by the Fascist state that assimilation could not be achieved and that only immigration would bring about Italianization. Contrary to this rather one-sided interpretation, the idea of an individual vote where each German speaker would determine his or her individual fate was a curious amalgam. On the one hand, it seems to reflect the embrace of racial ideology and the institution of racial laws in Italy, marking an approach where the possibility of assimilation or coexistence was denied, where differences became insurmountable, where “Italian-ness” was attainable only by birth. On the other hand, the Option as a policy did indeed provide an option, asking citizens to choose and allowing for the possibility that those who “chose” to be Italian would be considered Italian. On the Italian side, nationality was not completely severed from intention.Footnote 28
As these few examples indicate, a rhetoric of “Italian-ness” and claims of national allegiance were becoming increasingly common currency among groups who had not long before been largely indifferent to the claims of nation. In the age of the Option, “indifference” was increasingly not an option. At the same time, it is clear that the lack of resonance that nationalist claims had historically produced in the region continued to be very important in interwar discourse. For one thing, arguments about others' continuing indifference were an essential component of the claims individuals made about their own loyalty or national authenticity. For another, official accusations or prejudices about particular groups' lack of loyalty or commitment influenced both regime policy and local responses to the regime. Finally, it is evident that when locals appropriated the regime's nationalist rhetoric, there was a great deal of instrumentality and opportunism involved. Lack of patriotism became the traded insult of accusation and counteraccusation in which strong regional identities continued to define the sides in the dispute. In that sense, we might say, regionalism and indifference to nation often survived under the camouflage of an only skin-deep nationalist rhetoric.
In the question of “real Italian-ness,” regional differences thus played a powerful role, with Trentini competing against Italians from other provinces and Italian-speaking locals in South Tirol seeing themselves as different again. Yet other more intangible issues were also at stake. Such issues were rarely spelled out explicitly, but it is clear that the debate about who was truly Italian also involved questions of moral behavior and commitment to the cause. As early as his 1927 letter outlining the project of Italianization, Mussolini had asserted that there was “no doubt that in the Alto Adige, precedence must be given to the Italian element, provided it is Italians deserving of that name.”Footnote 29 He elaborated on this point when he stressed that it was essential to:
keep watch that civil servants, officers, soldiers, and policemen always maintain a dignified attitude, as a victorious people, proud not only of its victory but also of its civilization and its history, is bound to do. Without misplaced arrogance, those who are representatives of the Fascist State in the Alto Adige must place the maximum attention in safeguarding their prestige, which is the prestige of the State.Footnote 30
It is the relationship among moral values, political loyalty, class affiliation, and the assertion of Italian-ness to which we must now turn.
Italian Presence versus Italian Prestige and the Question of “Healthy Elements”
As we have seen, by the mid 1930s, the project of transforming the borderland into a new Italian homeland came to be seen largely as one of immigration. Yet the imported settlers—farmers, industrial workers, laborers, soldiers—were generally more intent on making a living than on being worthy carriers of Italian-ness. Some relocated their families; others did not plan on settling permanently. Some were ardent Fascists; others did not share the regime's nationalist principles or espouse the views of Fascist sympathizers in the province. All these migrants and settlers were there on the understanding that their task was to Italianize the province. Yet there were limits to how far the authorities and settlers themselves were willing to accept “Italian-ness” as a rationale for permanence in the province, as illustrated for example in the many conflicts among people from different regions. More importantly, the authorities were not willing to accept just any claim to “Italian-ness.” The Trentini were far from the only undesirable Italians.
Concerned about the success of the project, state authorities mulled over the question of who would compose the “best elements” for turning the South Tirol into an Italian province. Many shared the conviction that originating from one of the old provinces disposed a settler to be a trustworthy Italian. In the words of Prefect Giovanni Mastromattei, “healthy elements from the old provinces” would alter the makeup of the province and launch its ultimate Italianization.Footnote 31 Yet this somewhat simplistic assumption did not bear itself out in practice. The authorities worried incessantly over settlers' class status, level of cultural refinement, political loyalty and reliability, and their lack of “prestige” and lowly image—fearing that deficiencies in these areas would undermine Italian “penetration” of the province. Italian workers came to be seen as a necessity but also as a liability in the Italianization effort. Italianization entailed bringing in Italians, but not just any Italians.
One would expect provincial party secretary Console P. Bellini to have supported the immigration effort, to follow through on Mussolini's proposal to Italianize the province via immigration. Yet in a letter to Prefect Marziali in 1933, Bellini commented negatively on the arrival of workers from other provinces.Footnote 32 According to Bellini, such workers were undermining the endeavors to alleviate unemployment among the native Italian speakers, whom Bellini denoted as “our workers”:
I point out that this fact, [immigration] besides compounding the problem of unemployment among our workers, offers a spectacle obviously harmful toward our prestige and national dignity, because foreign tourists and allogeni have the opportunity to see idle workers offering their work at humiliating prices and surely magnify this image through their usual prejudices.Footnote 33
Bellini depicted “our workers”—workers who would have included the family of interviewee Rino Canali—in opposition to the destitute immigrants from other provinces and the mocking German speakers. In his view, it was those immigrants, not the unemployed, resident Italian-speakers, who were offering a spectacle of misery and humiliation to the local German-speaking population and the foreign tourists.
Bellini invoked the “spectacle of misery” again in a letter written a few months later to the new prefect, Giovanni Mastromattei:
First of all, there is the nuisance, taking place in recent years, of migration to this province by a large number of unemployed people from adjacent provinces…, in the hope of finding work. They end up staying in Bolzano, Merano, Bressanone and Brunico, idling and offering a spectacle of misery that is inappropriate in the eyes of this population.Footnote 34
Rejecting welfare assistance as an option, Bellini asked Mastromattei to take action and limit immigration into the province.
Again in early 1941, the provincial party secretary, now Vittorio Passalacqua, wrote to the prefect, commenting on “illegal immigration of Italian citizens arriving from the old provinces, particularly from the Venetian ones.” These immigrants had initially moved to Merano and, after failing to find employment there, had moved to a nearby village and “adapted to a poor and indecorous existence, eventually found work and, always illegally, sent for their families.” He continued that their presence “could not be tolerated.”Footnote 35 Passalacqua conceded that immigration had to be fostered, but those who were “undesirable” had to be expelled “for obvious political reasons, for Italian prestige, and ultimately to assure the resettlement of the Alto Adige (by replacing the allogeni) with valid workers whose moral and political histories are favorable in every respect.”Footnote 36
Yet it was not only the image of illegal and itinerant day laborers that worried the authorities. Even respectable industrial workers were at risk of projecting an image of destitution. Industries setting up shop in South Tirol with government subsidies suppressed workers' wages and did not provide worker housing, thus causing workers and their families to live in “unhealthy environments and even in shacks.”Footnote 37 According to a secret police informant, this problem needed to be resolved at once “for the health of the masses and the dignity of fascist Italy in the eyes of the allogeni and the foreign tourists,” who commonly referred to the worker hamlet as “little Italy.”Footnote 38 Clearly, the designation “little Italy” was meant as a slur and linked the Italian immigrants in South Tirol to Italy's history of emigration and hardship in the New World.
The desolate image projected by the impoverished immigrant workers was not the authorities' only worry. In 1938, factory workers in South Tirol were paid 64 lire per week, which in the words of the police informant was “not enough to feed an animal!!!”Footnote 39 Raising the specter of a Communist insurgence, the informant asked sarcastically whether “our aim is that these workers, who have been brought in from every province without paying attention to their political and moral past, should develop antifascist sentiments?” Whether out of genuine concern that anti-Fascism could take root or out of desperation for action from the state, local representatives raised the specter that must have been the regime's worst nightmare: the prospect of its emissaries becoming anti-Fascists.
What underwrote the settlement policies in South Tirol was a totalitarian aspiration to create not only an Italian, but also a perfect Fascist homeland. Hence, not everyone was welcome, and numbers alone would not suffice. To many officials involved in the Italianization project it was prestige that mattered most. A central concern was the image of “misery” that the native, German-speaking South Tiroleans might form of the immigrant Italians. There was, after all, a long-standing stereotype of the archetypal Italian as impoverished migrant laborer, condemned to seek a livelihood far from home. This was the view the regime was at such pains to dispel and to cultivate in its stead, a vision of superiority, of Italian civilization and prestige. Thus not everyone claiming to be Italian was deemed “Italian” enough to face the challenges of Italianizing a border province. The authorities sought to select only the “best elements.” In other words, the nationalist aspirations of the political leadership once again clashed with popular understandings and responses.
As in other provinces, workers in South Tirol were closely monitored and severely punished for anti-Fascist activities and sentiments, enduring a surprisingly high level of state supervision and retribution given that they were supposed to be the rightful inhabitants of the redeemed province and that many of them had undergone a strict selection process. The constant surveillance and many denunciations and convictions provide a different picture of the immigrant Italians, who have generally been equated with the Fascist system in the popular imaginary. Even the historiography of interwar South Tirol has tended to portray the German-speaking population as the only group in the region to be controlled and restricted under the Fascist dictatorship.
The mere fact of coming from the “old provinces” afforded workers the presumption of being good Italians, but their behavior and political leanings could easily undo this benefit. The authorities complained frequently that workers did not seem to care about the Italianization effort or understand its significance. Just as in the prewar period, a nationalistic elite was disappointed by the rather “indifferent” mass that struggled to make ends meet and sought opportunities in a new province. Yet some immigrants seem to have embraced the language of nationalism—at least in their dealings with the state. Their speech acts may or may not provide a window into their “subjectivities,” but they certainly indicate a context in which people felt called upon to define themselves as good Italians.
When Domenico Roso, a peasant under contract with the Veterans' Association who managed a series of farmsteads in South Tirol, wrote to the Association to ask for financial help, he cast his labor and sacrifice in nationalist terms. Resorting to the Veneto dialect to recount his experience, Roso wrote that he took his assignment of Italianizing the border province seriously. His family had suffered greatly during and after the Great War, and he had accepted a contract with the Veterans' Association out of economic necessity. In Alto Adige, he had to battle with harsh environmental and economic conditions, was plagued by debt, and his farm was far away from the village and the amenities it provided: school, health care, and religious services. He had done his part in the war, and he would continue to do so as a mountain farmer at the nation's border, but he deserved to be helped in order to provide for his family and fulfill his “duty together with [his] family as a true Italian.”Footnote 40 He tilled the “fields of the nation” among “Italians who did not want to be Italian,” namely, his German-speaking neighbors, who were Italian citizens, but who, he believed, did not want to belong.
Roso's claim of “true” Italian-ness and national devotion, however, was not instantly rewarded. The headquarters of the Veterans' Association in Rome did not think he deserved financial assistance, and it was only once the prefect intervened, worried about the Italian authorities' image if they put one of their own out on street, that the Veterans' Association decided to continue supporting Roso. To what extent Roso indeed espoused the nationalist politics of the regime remains an open question. What is certain is that he was willing to play the nationalist game to gain assistance.
Although Roso's notion of good Italians excluded only the German-speaking Italian citizens in province, other Italians defined “true” Italians more narrowly. They used the language of nation to indict the inappropriate behavior of other Italian speakers and to contrast it with their own loyalty and commitment. Unwilling to disclose their real names, a group accusing a fellow Italian of cheating the state by selling adulterated gasoline to a South Tirolean municipality felt compelled to sign an anonymous letter with the appellation “a group of Italians who are really Italian,” implying that other Italians were not “real.”Footnote 41 These “real” Italians added that “these facts are not only known to us, but are also known by the Germans and one can imagine what sort of respect or better esteem these people might have of the Italians.” Their supposed concern over Italian prestige reflected the apprehensions repeatedly expressed by the authorities. In a similar vein, Pietro Campese set himself apart from other Italians when he complained that his municipality had not paid rent for his house, which was being used as a school. As he spoke of his love for the fatherland and his sacrifice in the interest of building “Italian-ness” in the province, he described himself as being “really the true expression of Italian-ness,” leaving unsaid who the inauthentic Italians were.Footnote 42
As these examples illustrate, accusations, denunciations, and recriminations among the newly immigrated were cast in terms of each other's “Italian-ness”: by accusing others of not being “true Italians,” by taking on the label of “real Italian,” or conversely by insulting others as “Italian” (as distinct from an Italian-speaking Trentino, for example). In these disputes, Italian immigrants in the province cannily exploited the regime's preferences, instrumentalizing nationalist discourse in pursuit of their own interest. Expressing the conviction that citizenship and language alone did not make an Italian, they remained vague in their definition of what Italian-ness actually meant, while differentiating between various degrees of national authenticity.
Conclusion
Under Italian Fascist rule, the speech acts of immigrant as well as of local Italian speakers, in the South Tirolean borderland suggest that Italian-ness was a multifaceted, versatile notion that could be invoked to claim, to dole out, or to receive privileges and entitlements. Responding to official rhetoric, Italian speakers in the province cast competing claims to entitlement in terms of sentiments of “Italian-ness,” or the lack thereof. Ultimately, these conflicts came to the fore because of South Tirol's borderland status and official efforts to import “Italianità” coupled with the uncertainty of whether such Italian-ness could be created via the assimilation of the Germans-speaking population.
As we have seen, the Italians arriving from different regions did not naturally coalesce into a homogenous group. Like peasant Roso, many did not instantly feel at home in their new homeland, simultaneously perceiving it to be both “Italian” and “foreign.” The sense that this was a foreign environment where a different language was spoken and different traditions followed was actually exacerbated by Fascist propaganda which, in claiming that the territory needed to be transformed, acknowledged its alien character. Paralleling the designation of the South Tiroleans as allogeni, “native but foreign,” the Italians perceived themselves as “legitimate but foreign.” They believed that as Italians they had an inherent right to the Alto Adige, but they also understood that their presence and success hinged on their claims to Italian-ness.
Undoubtedly, the concept of nation was important for the new immigrants, both as a justification for their presence and as a source of pride and strength, but it did not necessarily solve the problem of classifying oneself and others or automatically create bonds to neighbors from other regions. To the extent that immigrants did see themselves as Italian nationals, that self-perception did not also necessarily correspond to the nationalism promoted by the regime. The point, it should be noted, is not that ordinary people did not care or that they simply parroted the Fascist rhetoric of nation without believing it, but that they mediated two realms of discourse. They seemed to possess a keen sensibility of what counted as important in the new Fascist state, using rhetoric when it benefited them or at times reforging the concept of Italian-ness when official notions did not suit their view of the world. Italian identity was often donned temporarily, like a suit, either for reasons of prestige or opportunism in interactions with the state, as when, for example, new immigrants sought to claim entitlements in the name of Italy. At other times, immigrants preferred to rely on other forms of identification such as their occupational status or regional provenance. These distinctions often remained at the fore even when the immigrants chose to cast them in the language of “nation,” claiming that their “Italian-ness” was more “Italian” than that of other groups in South Tirol. The evidence suggests that although trumpeting nationalism was critical to the Fascist regime, to many of its subjects nationalism held only contingent value. Not completely indifferent to nation, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly espousing it, immigrants responded to Fascist hypernationalism with their own idiosyncratic interpretations of nation, using it to uphold established regional and social distinctions.
For the Italian Fascists (as indeed for other Fascist movements), nationalism was at once all-present, brandished constantly in speeches and spectacle, and yet selective, as not every Italian looked ready to propel the nation to greatness. Much engineering would be necessary to create the “new Fascist man.” Activists' conceptions of nationhood were far from consistent, and the Italianization policies of the regime displayed fluctuating priorities and unstable hierarchies of Italian-ness. Unsurprisingly, the regime's inconsistency presented challenges and opportunities not only to the population at large, but also to local state representatives. It reinforced the central lesson that Fascist rule no longer allowed indifference to nation per se but rather encouraged a piecemeal and opportunistic deployment of nationalist claims and language. For their part, the people on the ground mediated their national identification in particular ways, folding this new central ideology and prescription into their everyday lives, adapting it to their concerns as they found themselves in a new political environment, and displaying agency in their relationship toward the versions of nation professed by the leadership. At times, they might even have asserted an Italian-ness that the new regime, in spite of its push toward greater national consciousness, was unwilling to acknowledge. Sometimes, when it was in their interests to do so, it was the people who sounded the clarion call of nation more stridently than the authorities, whereas the authorities had to tone down their message for pragmatic reasons of governance and administration.
Opportunism is, we might say, what happened to indifference in an age where indifference was no longer possible. More often than not, the characters whose traces I found in the archives donned a nationalist mantle because in the new world of Fascist nationalism, it was the way to get a job or a plot of land. Not all of their appeals were successful. Not everyone who claimed to be Italian was automatically recognized as such. The radical nationalism of the Fascists always involved selection and exclusion. In the borderland, where the nation had to be engineered from the ground up, the authorities resorted to more and more exclusionary models of national community, placing ever more stringent demands on themselves and the people they ruled. Paradoxically then, at such moments, it was this most nationalist regime that could be “indifferent,” at least to the claims of some nationals. Here, it was not the usual “in-betweens,” those who spoke several languages and lived by several traditions, who found themselves excluded. When the Veterans' Association saw no value in keeping Roso on his farmstead, or when state authorities continued to be suspicious of the Trentini, these judgments affected people who had come to think of themselves as fully Italian. That they indeed were Italian citizens, spoke the Italian language, and had resided in one of the “old provinces,” seemed to matter little to the representatives of the Fascist state. What mattered was whether they had the right attitude and could enhance national prestige.
All this might seem to confirm the widely held view that “Italian-ness” has never really stuck and that Italians keep needing to be “made.” Yet, however transitory its influence may have been, as long as it was in power, the Fascist regime demanded attention. Italians were forced to take the idea of nation seriously. At the same time, the historiography painting a Fascist consensus and claiming that the Fascists succeeded in creating a nationalist self does not capture what was at play either. A substantial gap remained between the official politics of nation and people's understanding and uses of the national community. Even though the population could often no longer remain indifferent, it was often opportunist. The concept of indifference to nation thus alerts us not only to those inherited provincial, regional, and supranational allegiances that the regime had to overcome, but also invites us, as a heuristic term, to consider the evolving and complex interactions between regime and population around the notion of nation. Right up to the end of Fascist rule, political leaders, local elites, and general population continued to trade competing definitions of “Italians,” “true Italians,” “real Italians,” and “Italians who don't want to be Italians.”
Interestingly, “Italian-ness” started to coalesce into a shared identity in South Tirol when the postwar Italian state acknowledged the “German-ness” and “Tirolean-ness” of the area, thus conceding what the Fascists had sought to eradicate. Particularly the granting of an autonomous status to the province and the implementation of special provisions for the use of the German language throughout the 1970s and 1980s gave rise to a sense of siege among the Italian speakers in the province, who increasingly came to identify themselves as propagators and defenders of the Italian nation, culture, and language. Associating themselves with the Italian nation, Italian speakers have been inclined to overlook the repressive sides of Fascism and to invoke its postwar successor party as a means to defend their culture and language in a region where the German-speaking majority continues to assert the community's distinct Tirolean heritage. Some of my interview partners expressed the feeling that the Italian community had been marginalized and that everything was becoming more “German,” rather than more “Italian,” as South Tirol's incorporation in the Italian state should have warranted. For them, it is their masters in Rome who have become indifferent.
