From the South Tyrolean to the Appalachian Mountains

I must begin with a confession: So far, I have not had the opportunity to read much of Peter Petschauer’s work. But that is about to change. I recently read one of his autobiographical-historical works with great interest in the very place to which it largely refers: Brixen/Bressanone in South Tyrol and its surroundings. When I told Brigitte (Demeure) at Easter that I would be at a conference in Brixen at the end of June, I received from her the answer that Peter had spent his childhood years there and had written a book about it. She would ask him to send it to me. Only three days later I had the book, which translates in English to All the Things One Learns: South Tyrolean Backing for the Modern World (2022), on my table, with a personal greeting on the cover.

On the back of the book, I discovered the note that Peter had taught Russian as well as European history at Appalachian State University of North Carolina. In my thank you email, I picked up on this because Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has frightened and worried most people in Western Europe and many in the U.S. But for someone who has studied Russia’s history in depth, this very development, I assumed, would be an alarming subject for reflection. In his reply on April 8, 2023, Peter confirmed this and expressed his disappointment that there was another war emanating from Russia despite all hopes to the contrary. Also that in this war, too, the civilian population would again suffer greatly, and it would take at least three future generations to work through the associated traumas transgenerationally—if we give our planet the chance to put up with us for that much longer.

The stories that the book brings together are themselves shaped by the two world wars. Already in the First World War, there were terrible and loss-filled battles in the high Alpine Mountains between Austria-Hungary and the Republic of Italy. The region of South Tyrol where Peter grew up was part of this Alpine battlefield. A TV documentary film, translated in English to The Battle in the Alps (2014), made clear to me in a frightening way what massive destruction and “wounds” these battles left behind in the high mountains of the Alps wherever the front ran, especially in the Dolomites. This left deep wounds not only in the mountains but also in the psyche of the people living there.

Many of the young men who took part in the fighting at that time, if they were not wounded or killed in combat, froze or even

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starved to death there during the winter months and the freezing nights of the other seasons. The inadequate supply of winter clothing and food was matched by insufficient weapons and ammunition. With the defeat of Austria-Hungary, South Tyrol, where to this day about 80% of the population speaks German, fell to Italy in 1919. This is also how the author’s father got his job during the Nazi era in 1942: As a member of the SS, he was tasked with convincing the South Tyrolean farmers to “come home to the Reich” (Petschauer, 2022, p. 35). It was an ideological bias of the Nazis to motivate German-speaking people from neighboring countries to move to Nazi Germany and bring them under control. In return, they were made all kinds of promises by the German side, which later turned out to be largely worthless. But his father—and Peter gives him credit for this—did not exert pressure on the population like many other Nazis did; instead, he tried to persuade them. However, he often failed to do so, which is why he was finally transferred back to Berlin in 1944.

Through this activity, however, his father had also become acquainted with the family at the Egarter Hof in Afers near Brixen and intuitively sensed that Peter and his younger brother Klaus would be well accommodated there and safe from the war. Klaus in 1946 fell ill and died at the age of five. Perhaps, however, his father also sensed that his wife was completely overwhelmed with the care and upbringing of the children. In retrospect, Peter states that he had a total of four mothers: his biological, often helpless mother; the sturdy Egarter farmer’s wife; her eldest daughter Agnes, called Neas; and later, his father’s second wife (see also Peter’s 2014 book, In the Face of Evil: The Sustenance of Tradition). Especially given the emotional “strangeness” of his birth mother, this helped with the stable psychological development of the child. As bonding theory demonstrates, children turn to and choose as central attachment figures those people who can give them the best emotional and mental resonance.

What fascinates me about this book is the sensitive and alert circumspection for the many details, events, politics, and social happenings, with which Peter Petschauer describes this rural world of that time and its later changes. He also has an alert eye for and understanding of the forms of education and their effects, the social conditions of poverty, and the everyday challenges of life in a time when there was no electricity and no running water for a long time—at least on the farms. He also addresses, for example, the

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development of disease and infant mortality, nutrition, educational opportunities, and the influence of the Catholic Church, which at that time still tried to intimidate and control people by spreading fears of an all-seeing God. The author demonstrates here a fine faculty of observation, developed at an early age, combined with the ability to recall and interpret the many details in terms of their significance for people’s lives and to grasp the interrelationships and interactions. This makes the book an excellent combination of regional and cultural history, milieu history experienced through life history, political history, and the description of the technical revolutions of the post-war period and their effects on the lives of the people in that borderland between Austria and Italy. One could also say that from the age of four, the author discovered the scientific method of participatory observation and has made it fruitful through his understanding recollection in retrospect.

However, the subtitle of the book, Südtiroler Rückhalt für die moderne Welt (South Tyrolean Support for the Modern World), opens yet another chapter of psychohistorical research: the question of the connection between stable regional and emotional rootedness and successful coping with migration experiences. It is possible that when rootedness in a supportive human environment takes place, emigration, combined with detachment and wandering, can succeed. The emotional ground on which this is built remains a secure inner ground. From the psychoanalytic point of view, we speak of the successful integration of good inner objects into the sense of self.

From the neighborhood of the surrounding farms, Peter also knew—fortunately only from a distance—opposite conditions. Beating, humiliating, and harassing children and adults (especially women and dependent persons like maids and farmhands) led to alcoholism, violence, and brutality against animals and people (forms of self-destruction and destruction of others). All of these are forms of relationships that have also led and continue to lead to dictatorships such as Italian fascism, National Socialism, and other forms of destructive abuse of power. Such insights are consistent with the findings of the authoritarianism studies of the Frankfurt School of Social Research (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and others).

Peter also refers to this in his mail to me on April 8^th in which he mentions Putin’s very negative childhood and youth marked by violence in connection with the unprocessed war trau-

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mas of his parents. This is not a form of excusing Putin’s policy of violence, because the latter could have chosen to work through and process his personal history, but instead turned to a conservative-nationalist and revanchist stance. However, it supports the connection between early experiences of neglect, violence, and disregard, to the danger of acting this out destructively later. If such people get into positions of power, they impose on thousands of others through reenactments of what they themselves were not able to process. Concerning his own father, Peter acknowledges that later (after 1945), his father was able to see the lies spread by National Socialism and regretted his enthusiasm for it.

What I learned from the book and my simultaneous stay in Brixen/Bressanone, which has become a tourist magnet in summer and winter, was that after the two world wars, the people there managed to come to terms with each other in a largely peaceful coexistence in this constantly changing world. But the trauma of losing one’s homeland in the political sense is nevertheless still palpable under the surface to this day, as Peter also points out in his contribution to Clio’s Psyche, “Südtirol/Alto Adige; Trauma Lingering in Open and Latent Hostilities” (Winter 2021, pp. 253-58). Covertly or overtly, the hostilities resurface again and again. Corresponding to this was, for example, a signpost I came across on the way between Brixen and Klosterneuburg, on which the nationalist claims of ownership and related intolerance toward the respective “others” were fought out with a felt pen:

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But there were also small stickers of an Italian initiative in Italian and German languages at various cultural-historical places in which their members apologize to South Tyroleans for the cultural expropriation of their place names and cultural assets.

The people Peter introduces us to in his book come very much alive through his descriptions so that in the end you get a feeling of knowing them a little bit after all. The Egarterin became very vivid and present for me when he describes her in her simultaneous severity, kindness, and warm-hearted interest in her fellow human beings (see the photo in the book on p. 53). He also empathizes with those persons and their life conditions who then ultimately failed due to circumstances as well as themselves. This is also true, for example, of the Egarters’ daughter, Kat’l, who took over the farm after her mother’s death but could not decide on any of the “available” men and instead chose alcohol “as a friend,” from which she ultimately perished. Peter succeeds in putting himself in the place of that woman, who should now have run the farm like her mother, but who no longer found the same conditions on the threshold of modernity. Life in the countryside was increasingly changing, the sisters were marrying away, and there were hardly any maids or farmhands left. Love, as it had bound Kat’l’s parents together, was rather the exception in those regions characterized by hard farm work and was sacrificed to economic-pragmatic “solutions.”

Occasionally, it seemed to me that empathy for others was also softening one’s own pain in understanding the pain of others, particularly when Peter writes about the close succession of the three deaths of Albert Clara, the imagined heir to the farm, then his “adoptive” mother, the Egarterin, and finally his younger brother Klaus. Referring to the daughters (the Gitschen), Peter states that they had to deal with the shock of a triple death within a very short time. In the margin of this statement, I wrote to myself: “but he himself also had to deal [with their deaths]!” Perhaps Peter knew the son of the family, Albert, less well, since Albert had been on war duty most of the time. But he had also experienced him singing and playing the organ in the church choir. At least the death of his emotionally most important mother, the Egarterin, must have affected him very much. Also, the loss of his younger brother, who was his own mother’s favorite child, was probably anything but easy for the author. The sympathy for the losses of the Egarter daughters may also echo his own grief.

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Although Peter was still a child at the time of World War II, he also gets to see something of the same at the end of the war. American bombers appear in the sky, flying over the Eisack Valley and coming under fire from German flak—and then, one or the other plane actually crashes. For children, it was still an adventure. But later, Peter is also able to empathize with the traumas of the war participants and prisoners of war.

For him, this later also becomes an occasion to deal with the crimes of National Socialism and its supporters. To do this, he draws on the autobiographical writings of Alice Miller and Marcel Reich-Ranicki, among others, and their experiences of persecution, humiliation, and traumatization. He also recounts a conversation he had with an elderly couple on a park bench in Prague near the former Jewish quarter. In the process, he learns that the couple’s parents were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. This set him off on a series of nightmares about persecution and impending extermination, which spurred him to look more deeply into the crimes of Nazism and his father’s role in that system—after all, his father also dealt with Heinrich Himmler in the early years of Nazi rule. His publications on The Father and the SS (2007, title translated from German) and In the Face of Evil (2014) have further deepened these discussions.

Finally, I want to say that what we are shown by Peter is how the social, political, and mental history of a time can be traced and understood in a lived and vividly conveyed life story while at the same time condensing it into a poetic narrative that is a pleasure to follow. Last, but not least, it is Peter’s poems—some of them are included in this book—that bring us closer to his life experience and insight into dense images. There is no better way to realize psychohistorical research.

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