About South Tyrol’s mendacious language policy – Friday

by time news

Hilde Domin shows in her well-known poem Unstoppable, as words can hit us more painfully than knives. The debut novel tells us that words can even seem dirty native language by South Tyrolean Maddalena Fingerle, born in 1993. The book, which has won several awards in Italy, is now available in a German translation from the fine Folio publishing house.

Fingerle’s protagonist and 18-year-old first-person narrator Paolo Prescher has a partly synaesthetic relationship with words. He associates every word with a smell, a colour. But above all, he divides words into “clean” or “dirty”. This depends heavily on who is pronouncing the words and whether they say what they say: “Poo is a much cleaner word than necessities or needs.” Paolo is bothered not only by his family’s hypocritical language conventions, but also by Language policy in South Tyrol. He opposes the politically correct and says “German” instead of “South Tyrolean German mother tongue”, says “negro”/”nigger” instead of black and thinks the fascist ostentatious buildings of Mussolini in Bozen are beautiful. Nevertheless, he is not a chauvi, because he resists explaining to which language group he would like to belong, which according to the 1972 Statute of Autonomy every citizen: in South Tyrol must indicate in order to reflect the proportional representation of the population in the administration. In this regard, Paolo is enraged that anyone can choose a mother tongue, even if he or she hardly knows the language – just to figure out better job opportunities.

After the death of his father, Paolo swore to himself that he would no longer speak a word of Italian, only German, and fled from Bolzano to Berlin. There the words appear pure to him. Even more so when he meets and falls in love with Mira di Pienaglossa. With her he speaks Italian again, because clean words come out of her. He is happy now – all the more so when he learns that she is pregnant by him. They decide to move to Bolzano. But there the problems with the dirty words start again and Paolo obsessively tries to clean them up…

Fingerle rightly draws attention to the absurdities that prevail in South Tyrol due to the autonomy statute, which does not promote togetherness, but perpetuates coexistence. The much-vaunted bilingualism/trilingualism does not actually exist, as there are monolingual schools and students are reluctant to learn the other national languages ​​(Italian, German, Ladin) because they feel they are forced on them. The text also points out that Standard German is not very popular, since most German speakers speak their South Tyrolean dialect.

Still, Fingerle’s novel isn’t convincing enough overall. First, the plot is grossly incoherent. A few examples: Paolo thinks Fascist buildings are great, but in Berlin he doesn’t seem to be interested in Nazi buildings – he could have liked the former Reich Ministry of Aviation, now the Federal Ministry of Finance. Berlin at all. You don’t even notice he’s there. It could also be Bielefeld or Backnang. It also seems unbelievable that Paolo doesn’t even explore the nightlife in Berlin. But there is a complete lack of understanding that Paolo does not find any hypocrisy or mendacity in the German or Berlin discourse. In short: fingerles native language has unfortunately degenerated into a chattering theses novel.

What literary virtues should a work have? The author should have followed one of her literary models, Italo Calvino, who in his Six proposals for the next millennium among other things speed, accuracy and complexity propagated.

native language Maddalena Fingerle Maria Elisabeth Brunner (Translation), Folio Verlag 2022, 180 p., 22 €

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