South Tyrol: A Minority Conflict of the Twentieth Century (Studies in Austrian and Central European History and Culture)
“The South Tyrol, or Alto Adige, became Italian with the treaties ending WW I. Austrian since the Middle Ages, it was mostly German and Ladinian speaking. Because Austria lost the war and Italy helped the Allies win it, Italy's reward was the push to the Brenner/Brennero below Innsbruck. From 1922 to 1945, the fascists launched campaigns to eliminate German from schools, Italianize German names, remove German speakers from public offices, and so on. When Mussolini and Hitler became allies, they agreed that German speakers should be removed from the region and replaced by Italians, but the concept did not work. Even after WW II, normalization did not come about until the late 1960s. Today, Italians and German speakers live in some harmony, both seeing advantages to the compromise in which German, Italian, and Ladinian are spoken, as amazing modernization proceeds as quickly as in the rest of mountainous Europe. Luckily for South Tyrol, it became part of Italy at a time when taking over foreign ethnic groups gradually became taboo. Steininger (Univ. of Innsbruck) gives a good overview of this troubled history, telling it from the German speakers' point of view. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” —P. Petschauer,Choice" ... Steininger demonstrates with brutal clarity is the inability of small ethnic communities to determine their own destiny." —German Studies Review