The South Tyrol Way (eBook)

Heirs to the War

Nationalism and wartime trauma in the cradle of a European conflict region – from the London Secret Treaty to the farewell of the Habsburg monarchy

South Tyrol is a war child. At the origins of the country as it understands itself in the present, there was a traumatic experience that tore away ideas about the future, securities, and livelihoods. It confronted people with completely changed living conditions and political perspectives. “This is the end, an end of horror,” the daily newspaper Der Tiroler described the situation in Bozen on 8 November 1918. A beginning that could bring an end to the horror was probably hard to see at the time.

The end of the First World War meant the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, to which Tyrol had belonged for centuries (cf. Sporer-Heis, 2008). This so-called “old Tyrol” comprised today’s North and East Tyrol in Austria, today’s South Tyrol, the Italian-speaking Welschtirol – or Trentino – from Salurn to Borghetto, and the Ladin-speaking Dolomites valleys in Trentino and Belluno (cf. Taibon, 2005; Moroder, 2016). The “country” reached from Kitzbühel on the north side of the Alps to Lake Garda.

Cracks in this unit had been announced long before that. In 1809, during the legendary Tyrolean freedom fights against the Napoleonic-Bavarian occupation, the German, Italian, and Ladin Schützen (shooters)1 still marched together for their ideal of “God, Emperor, and Fatherland” (Cole, 2000, p. 338; Cole, 2001, p. 78); from the middle of the 19th century onwards, the German- and Italian-speaking Tyrols, in particular, began to diverge. The liberal revolutions of 1848, in which the awakening national language consciousness spurred on the need for more freedom, triggered completely different moods in the Italian and German parts of Tyrol (cf. Heiss & Götz, 1998, p. 9). The German district governor, Johann Jakob Staffler from the Puster Valley, complained, for example, in 1848 that “the evil spirit of defiance and want of discipline” was spreading and that “nonsensical cries” of “freedom, equality, brotherhood” were being heard everywhere (Staffler, J., 1901, p. 78). At the same time, a liberal elite in Trento tried to lever the mood for the annexation of Welschtirol to Lombardy. The area around Milan was Austrian at the time but represented a homogeneous Italian-language and economically vital region. When the troops around Giuseppe Garibaldi, animated by the national idea of Italian unity, advanced against the Austrian borders, German-Tyrolean students and shooters, or riflemen (the Schützen), marched shoulder to shoulder to the southern front (Fontana, 1978, pp. 23–4). This concord is remarkable because the students were inspired by and enthusiastic about the spirit of national liberty (though German), while the shooters were loyal to the emperor.

In Welschtirol, the situation was less clear. Vast parts of the population still identified themselves with the monarchy, but intellectual and open-minded clerical circles increasingly oriented themselves toward Italy. Hardening, discord, and nationalisms that were building up even within the old Tyrol were harbingers of the subsequent breakup. Welschtirol longed for more autonomy and an upswing from its hinterland existence on the edge of the monarchy. At the same time, significant and increasingly nationalistic forces in German-speaking Tyrol opposed it (Peterlini, H. K., 2008a, p. 27). A German patriotic mobilization marked the centennial celebrations in 1909 in memory of 1809 and an inner withdrawal of Welschtirol from the monarchy (cf. Heiss, 2008, pp. 119–24; Hirn 1909/1983).2 The war was already casting its shadow at this time.

The shots from Sarajevo which killed the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, landed right in the middle of a powder keg, unleashing the readiness for war that had been held back only with difficulty through alliances, pacts of attack and non-aggression. Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 must also be seen in the light of the power struggles between Germany and Austria on the one hand and Russia, France and Great Britain on the other. Otherwise, it would be difficult to understand how the assassination could have triggered the chain reaction that plunged Europe into an unprecedented war. Of particular importance for Tyrol was the problematic relationship between Austria and Italy. The Italian state had only emerged from the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1861. It had established its young national identity precisely during the wars of independence over the Austrian-dominated northern Italian territories, especially with the conquest of Piedmont in 1858 and Milan in 1859 as the most critical steps toward the unification of Italy (cf. Forcher & Peterlini 2010, pp. 197–201). An early uprising against Austria had succeeded in 1848 but was still short-lived. Field Marshal Radetzky was first beaten in Milan and reclaimed the territory after three months. In 1866, Austria was still able to defend Veneto and Friuli but had to cede both areas because of its defeat by Prussia, which was allied with Italy. In 1870, Italy also conquered Rome and pushed back the papal states. Italian unification was almost complete, except for the last two “unredeemed” territories of Trento and Trieste, the terra irredenta (cf. Chisholm, 1911).

Italian irredentism, however, increasingly sought not only the Italian part of Tyrol – then Welschtirol, and now Trentino – but the entire area south of the Brenner Pass, i.e. including southern German- and Ladin-speaking Tyrol. Even a rather strategic reconciliation in the Austro-Italian “hereditary enmity” (Gatterer, 1972), when the Kingdom of Italy entered the Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany in 1882, did not change this. Formal reconciliation remained a pact that the population did not feel for and which was easy to revoke. With the outbreak of the First World War, Italy seized its opportunity. Strictly speaking, the Triple Alliance was only obliged to show solidarity with its partners in the event of a defensive war, but not in wars of aggression. Thus, Italy initially declared itself neutral and, at the same time, began to negotiate with both sides. From Austria, it demanded Trieste, Istria, and Welschtirol, a proposal which Emperor Franz Joseph I initially firmly rejected. This position only loosened with increasing Italian propaganda for entering the war against Austria. In 1915, Vienna signaled its intention to cede “Tyrol as far as it is of Italian nationality” (Forcher & Peterlini, 2010, p. 255). Too late: Italy had received more far-reaching promises in the event of its entry into the war alongside France, Great Britain, and Russia (Entente). With Article 4 of the London Secret Treaty of 26 April 1915, Italy was granted the territories of Trieste with the Istrian peninsula, Trentino, and “the Cisalpine Tyrol with its natural geographical and natural frontier” (Pollard, 1998, p. 20). The “natural frontier” was defined as the main ridge of the Alps with the Brenner Pass, and the Cisalpine Tyrol was simply the South Tyrol of today (cf. Moos, 2017). Immediately after that, on 4 May 1915, Italy resigned from the Triple Alliance, and on 23 May it declared war on Austria, its partner in the dissolved defense alliance.

Thus Tyrol was immediately on the verge of a virtually defenseless front. Tyrol’s conscripts had already been drafted to the Eastern Front, including the Kaiserjäger regiments, the Schützen, and the Landsturm regiments intended as a reserve. The Austrian military command had abandoned the Landlibell of 1511, which entrusted the Tyroleans with defending their land and saved them from military service outside the country. A whim of history, because this principle was one of the reasons why Tyrol had risen against the Napoleonic-Bavarian occupation in 1809, the densest initiation experience of the Tyrolean shooters’ tradition (cf. Peterlini, H. K., 2010a/b). From one day to the other, national defense, the central motif of Tyrolean identity under Austria, was in the hands of young boys and older men, who were rounded up into a defense force of some 30,000 men and sent to the southern outposts of the monarchy. The myth of national defense had been unintentionally reactivated by injury to the Landlibell (cf. Hartungen, 1995). The riflemen were assisted – another whim of history – by a relief corps from Bavaria, the former enemy territory (cf. Voigt, 2015). The mission of the 13 battalions of the German and largely Bavarian Alpenkorps was to hold the line at the Inn; the area south of the Brenner seemed to be lost. Nevertheless, the joint contingent was able to stop the “walk to Innsbruck” (Forcher & Peterlini, 2010, p. 257) hoped for by the Italian side at the southern borders of Tyrol, until the Kaiserjäger and Shooters returned from Serbia and Russia and took over the national defense. Units of the Imperial and Royal Army supported them.

The “front in rock and ice” (Langes, 1983), as it is mythically transfigured, was cruel. The soldiers of the two armies faced each other in dogged trench warfare under extreme conditions, at exposed heights and in bitter cold, with meager equipment and impaired supplies. Apart from those areas lost in the first Italian onslaught, such as Ampezzo in particular, not a single meter of ground was surrendered. The price of this was unimaginably high on both sides. The Isonzo Front to the east was mainly fought over;...