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Authors: Odon Von Horvath
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that it had been several hours now since he had thought about the pyramids.
He was once again distracted now that he was standing at the window, only this time by God’s magisterial mountain world, which is what Kitsch calls the Earth’s crust that broke asunder long ago.
“What is man next to a mountain?” it suddenly occurred to him. And this thought really took hold of him. “Next to a mountain man is one big nothing. You see, that’s why Iwouldn’t want to live in the mountains all the time. I’d rather live in the lowlands, at most maybe among some hills.”
CHAPTER 10
EVER SINCE THE TREATY OF SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE, the Austrian-Italian border had run along the top of the Brenner Pass between North and South Tyrol. The Italians, you see, helped deliver their brethren in Trento from the Habsburgs’ yoke. And any decent fellow can only openly salute a thing like that.
After all, the Italians had not entered the World War with the goal of subjugating foreign nations. They were no more bent on annexing territories than Count Berchtold, the ex-Emperor Wilhelm II, or Ludendorff were. But, alas, the Italians were simply forced to annex the entire German South Tyrol for military-strategic reasons, just like, say, Ludendorff would have been forced to annex Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Belgium, etc., for purely strategic reasons. “The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a downright crime,” a university professor from Innsbruck once said. And had he not been a chauvinist, he really would have been quite right.
As is generally known, Mussolini now wants to Italianize German South Tyrol to its core, just as ruthlessly as Prussia had once wanted to Germanize the Polish city of Poznan.
And so Mussolini, among other things, ordered that wherever possible all German names—place names,surnames, etc.—be rendered into Italian such that they could only be pronounced in Italian. And rendered according to their literal sense, at that. Should, however, a name lack a literally translatable sense, Mussolini would merely stick an “o” on the end of it. Such, for instance, as in “Merano.”
Brennero as well.
As Kobler caught sight of the Brennero, it immediately struck him that there was a great deal of construction going on up there, and of nothing but barracks.
The fascist officials were already expecting the express train at the Brennero train station. There were approximately thirty men standing around, and nearly every one of them had on a different type of uniform.
Some of them had on Napoleon hats and loose, long coats, or short, tight coats, or loose, short coats, or tight, long coats. Several of them were wearing illustrious cock’s feathers that wafted almost all the way down to their shoulders. And yet others were wearing eagle’s feathers or mallard’s feathers, and others wore no feathers at all, at most some down. Most of them were field-gray or field-brown, but there were also some there in a steel blue and greenish color with lapels in red, ocher, silver, gold, and lilac. Many of them were wearing black shirts—these were the famous Blackshirts.
It was a colorful sight. All of them seemed to be freezing because Northern Tyrol’s autumn-like fog hung barely a hundred meters above their heads.
None of the travelers were allowed to leave the express train. Things were quite a bit more stringent here than between Bavaria and Austria at Mittenwald, and not just because the Italians belong to the Romish race, but rather because they have, to top it all off, a Mussolini—a man whois in a constant furor about the fact that there are only forty million Italians in the world.
Twenty-nine of the thirty uniformed men were very busy with affairs related to crossing the border. The thirtieth man seemed to be the leader, which is to say he was not doing anything. He was standing on the platform, somewhat in the background beneath a colored photograph of the Duce, wearing very elegant shoes. He was
He was once again distracted now that he was standing at the window, only this time by God’s magisterial mountain world, which is what Kitsch calls the Earth’s crust that broke asunder long ago.
“What is man next to a mountain?” it suddenly occurred to him. And this thought really took hold of him. “Next to a mountain man is one big nothing. You see, that’s why Iwouldn’t want to live in the mountains all the time. I’d rather live in the lowlands, at most maybe among some hills.”
CHAPTER 10
EVER SINCE THE TREATY OF SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE, the Austrian-Italian border had run along the top of the Brenner Pass between North and South Tyrol. The Italians, you see, helped deliver their brethren in Trento from the Habsburgs’ yoke. And any decent fellow can only openly salute a thing like that.
After all, the Italians had not entered the World War with the goal of subjugating foreign nations. They were no more bent on annexing territories than Count Berchtold, the ex-Emperor Wilhelm II, or Ludendorff were. But, alas, the Italians were simply forced to annex the entire German South Tyrol for military-strategic reasons, just like, say, Ludendorff would have been forced to annex Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Belgium, etc., for purely strategic reasons. “The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a downright crime,” a university professor from Innsbruck once said. And had he not been a chauvinist, he really would have been quite right.
As is generally known, Mussolini now wants to Italianize German South Tyrol to its core, just as ruthlessly as Prussia had once wanted to Germanize the Polish city of Poznan.
And so Mussolini, among other things, ordered that wherever possible all German names—place names,surnames, etc.—be rendered into Italian such that they could only be pronounced in Italian. And rendered according to their literal sense, at that. Should, however, a name lack a literally translatable sense, Mussolini would merely stick an “o” on the end of it. Such, for instance, as in “Merano.”
Brennero as well.
As Kobler caught sight of the Brennero, it immediately struck him that there was a great deal of construction going on up there, and of nothing but barracks.
The fascist officials were already expecting the express train at the Brennero train station. There were approximately thirty men standing around, and nearly every one of them had on a different type of uniform.
Some of them had on Napoleon hats and loose, long coats, or short, tight coats, or loose, short coats, or tight, long coats. Several of them were wearing illustrious cock’s feathers that wafted almost all the way down to their shoulders. And yet others were wearing eagle’s feathers or mallard’s feathers, and others wore no feathers at all, at most some down. Most of them were field-gray or field-brown, but there were also some there in a steel blue and greenish color with lapels in red, ocher, silver, gold, and lilac. Many of them were wearing black shirts—these were the famous Blackshirts.
It was a colorful sight. All of them seemed to be freezing because Northern Tyrol’s autumn-like fog hung barely a hundred meters above their heads.
None of the travelers were allowed to leave the express train. Things were quite a bit more stringent here than between Bavaria and Austria at Mittenwald, and not just because the Italians belong to the Romish race, but rather because they have, to top it all off, a Mussolini—a man whois in a constant furor about the fact that there are only forty million Italians in the world.
Twenty-nine of the thirty uniformed men were very busy with affairs related to crossing the border. The thirtieth man seemed to be the leader, which is to say he was not doing anything. He was standing on the platform, somewhat in the background beneath a colored photograph of the Duce, wearing very elegant shoes. He was
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