![]() Colabella, 72, showed a visitor a clunky, battery-powered head lamp he had used in the mines. Curzi and his friends Giuseppe La Torre and Antonio Colabella. ''We show German prejudices toward Italians, but also the German longing for Italian beaches, for laughter, for the lightness of the culture.''Īmong the items on exhibit are faded family photographs, employment contracts yellowed with age and a pair of woolen socks sent by an Italian mother fretting about her son's first winter in ice-bound Germany. ''We wanted to trace how this relationship has evolved,'' said Dietmar Osses, the director of the museum. Titled ''Naples-Bochum-Rimini,'' it documents the wave of Gastarbeiters, or guest workers, who came to the Ruhr Valley from Italy, as well as the Germans who chose Italy as their first playground after shaking off the ashes of war. In a strange coincidence, a museum here just opened an exhibit devoted to the vast, but uneasy, two-way traffic between Germany and Italy. Italians admire Germans, but don't love them.'' ''Germans love Italians, but don't admire them. Curzi sums up with an old cliché about the right-brain, left-brain relationship between the countries. They worry that the spat will revive old prejudices on both sides, which Mr. Curzi, with German wives and children - and a hard-won sense of belonging to their adopted land. An unsung part of Germany's postwar economic miracle, they toiled in coal mines, steel mills or on the railroad. Tens of thousands of Italians immigrated to industrial cities like Bochum after World War II, in search of work. Here in the Ruhr Valley, however, the tiff has touched a nerve. Schröder canceled his vacation in a resort town on the Italian coast to register his anger at the anti-German remarks. Berlusconi and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder kicking sand at each other like unruly teenagers at the beach. In Berlin and Rome, the recent war of words between Germany and Italy has been portrayed as a sort of summer theater, with Mr. When you say things like this minister, you stir up the same kind of prejudice we faced when we got here.'' ''He damaged every Italian business in Germany - every pizzeria, every ice cream shop. Curzi, as two old Italian friends nodded gravely. ''He didn't just damage Italian tourism,'' said Mr. Curzi, an Italian who immigrated to Germany, really got upset when he heard that a junior tourism minister in Italy had described Germans as ''hypernationalistic blonds'' who invaded Italian beaches and held ''noisy burping contests.'' ''We have our own little Benito problem,'' he said, referring to Mussolini.īut Mr. To Celso Curzi, it was deplorable enough that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy likened a German member of the European Parliament to a guard in a Nazi camp. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |