Eva Sleeps Read Online Free Page B

Caserta, Agrigento and Rovigo could only weep at the thankless task of trying to make these blockheads produce the musical sounds of the Italian language. Brave teachers throughout the territory carried on teaching German in Katakombenschulen
, 5 the clandestine schools. Italianizing place names hadn’t sufficed either. Now, people would look up at the bell towers to work out where they were: if it was bulb-shaped, they knew they were in Völs, if pointy, then in Blumau. As for “Fiè,” “Prato Isarco” and all the other names invented by Mussolini’s topographer, Tolomei, nobody used them except bureaucrats.
    There was only one solution for truly Romanizing that beautiful, vertical land: allowing only Italians to live there. It was not enough that the flow of immigrants from other regions was motivated and supported by Fascism in the hope that, someday, German-speaking South Tyroleans would become a minority in their own land. No, they actually had to leave.
    Hitler embraced this idea enthusiastically. Ensuring the purity of nations by moving (or erasing) larges masses of people across the map was his favorite occupation. So he promised Mussolini that if the
Südtiroler
wished to carry on being German, they would be welcomed with open arms by the Greater Germany, and by their brothers who belonged to the pure Aryan race. He would give each and every one of them a new maso as large as the one they’d left behind south of the Brenner Pass, the same size fields and pastures, the same number of cows and, so assured the propaganda, of the same color coat as those left in the hayloft by their ancestors. The Sudeten, Galicia, Styria and even Burgundy then, later on, the boundless lands taken away from the worthless Slav people: Tatras, in Poland, the immense Hungarian
puszta
, and soon also lush Crimea. Anyone who left Alto Adige would find fertile lands that only needed a virile German workforce to become paradise on earth.
    Mussolini, at the same time, was threatening the
Dableiber
, those who remained, with forced Italianization: speaking German was totally forbidden, even in private, and anyone not adopting Italian—in fact, Roman (with a capital “R” on the flyers)—customs and practices would be deported en masse to Sicily, to grow prickly pears—what they were exactly, nobody really knew. The choice wasn’t between staying or going, but between declaring yourself to be either a
Walsch
or a
Daitsch
: Italian or German. You could not remain a German on Italian soil.
    Whether or not you left was presented as a matter of free choice. However, the decision to leave, so said the Nazi flyers, would be rewarded as a clear sign of love and devotion to the Great Germanic cause. Whoever loved their
Heimat
was certainly ready to abandon it and rebuild it elsewhere, exactly the same, in the bosom of the Thousand-Year Reich. Remaining, on the other hand, was an unequivocal sign of betrayal, insubordination against the National Socialist cause, cowardice.
    These were your options; actually
die Option
.
    No peasant would have chosen to leave his
maso
but they all felt
Daitsch
, and the vast majority ended up doing just that. They opted to, as they used to say. Still, there were too many peasants who would whisper to their wives under the goose eiderdowns at night, wondering: but what about their field, deforested by their great-grandfathers with saws and axes a century earlier? Would they really never see it again? And what about those lands, where cows of the same color awaited,
masi
with the same extensions, the same number of trees as what they’d leave behind—were they uninhabited? And if they weren’t, then where would the inhabitants go?
    Hermann enthusiastically took part in the persecution organized by the regime against the
Dableiber
. With the blessing of Fascist party officials, he maimed heavy draft horses. He killed guard dogs. He smeared his own excrement