South Tyrol's Identity Crisis: Italian, German, Austrian...?

BBC: Nestled in the mountains of the Alps, it's Italy's richest province, and has been part of the country for almost 100 years - but some in South Tyrol just don't feel fully Italian.

A few years ago I had to ring up the War Graves Association in South Tyrol.

An Alpine glacier near the Austrian-Italian border was melting and had revealed the bodies of three soldiers, killed in the bloody mountain battles of the World War I.

The phone was answered by a man who spoke German with a strong Tyrolean accent.

"Were these soldiers from the Austrian army or the Italian army?" I asked.

"They were part of the Austrian army," he said.

"And where were they found?" I asked.

"In the Ortler Alps," he replied. "It used to be Austria, but now it is Italy - unfortunately."

South Tyrol, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was annexed to Italy in 1919, at the end of the World War I. The Italians wanted to have control of the Alps, south of the Brenner Pass.

Many people here are native German speakers. And a few of them, like the man from the War Graves Association, are still not reconciled to the fact that the province has been part of Italy for almost a century.

In the 1920s and 30s, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini encouraged Italians from the south to settle in the region.

German was widely banned, in schools, in courts and in public offices, and place names were "Italianised".

It all contributed to what one local author described to me as the "longstanding hostility" between the two language groups. » | Bethany Bell, BBC News, Bolzano, Italy | Saturday, December 08, 2012

Austria’s Graf Gets Grief Over “United Tyrol”
REUTERS – BLOG: Breaking into the summer holiday lull, Austrian politics has gotten into a lather over a far-right populist’s call for a referendum on whether a mainly German-speaking region of northern Italy should rejoin Austria.

No matter how far-fetched, his proposal raised a hue and cry by challenging the taboo of old unreconstructed nationalism in a country restlessly determined to live down its Nazi past.

South Tyrol - Alto Adige in Italian - is an autonomous, Alpine province of Italy bordering Austria. It was annexed by Italy from defeated Austria-Hungary at the end of World War One.

Italy granted increasing self-government to South Tyrol in the decades after World War Two, defusing separatist unrest by Austro-German speakers. It is now among Italy’s richest regions, with an open border to Austria thanks to EU integration.

But Martin Graf, a rightist deputy speaker of Austria’s parliament, declared on Sunday that South Tyrol was actually “part of overall Tyrol”, and only “currently” within Italy.

The universal right of self-determination should apply for all “the German people” in Europe - just as those in old Communist East Germany got their wish to merge into one Germany at the end of the Cold War in 1990. “It’s time to ask the people if there should be one Tyrol,” Graf said. >>> Mark Heinrich | Wednesday, July 29, 2009