[italian text]

I could paraphrase Umberto Eco, saying that today, thinking about the idea of a war between spanish, germans, french and italians would be hilarious. While the fact of an italian media campaign against germans it’s not much amusing. There’s economy in-between, there’s an Italian Prime minister welcomed by the Merkel government, by the germans, by the european financial system, who is deciding about the destiny of Italian popolution. This person, who was maybe browbeaten, rather than suggested from Berlin to the Italian President in Rome, is nowadays judged by italian public opinion as a defender of the country, an idea developed mainly in the moderate left wing area.

While horizontally the Parliament passed a vote confidence to the new Monti Governement and its economic measures are strangling the lowest classes, mainstream media grant him blind confidence or, more subreptitiously some try to destroy his figure to yearn for next political elections, because the government of “technicians”, we should clarify our idea of what technical really means, isn’t the expression of the italian electorate.

On this dangerous path we’ve read an incredible story, which was possibile only in Italy. German journalist Jan Fleischhauer wrote a column about the Costa Concordia tragedy on the popular German magazine Der Spiegel; his comment was partially reported by italian newspaper Repubblica and another italian newspaper called Il Giornale (property of former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi and accostumed in creating fake scandals), opens on this report a wide anti-German campaign right during a sensitive date like the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The issue now is not really the fact that Il Giornale started its detractive campaign against an entire popolution accusing them of persisting racism and nazism. The real issue is the helplessness of italian readers facing an article written in German, who, at best open Google translator or Babelfish and confy in an automatic translation provided by a machine.

It’s clear that facing an article in an unknown language we have no intellectual tools to verify the content and the criticisms on it.

European issues are not only a consequence of a federative administration grounding its powers on currency and keeping legal standpoints and politics out in a clutter of national-local politics (can we imagine its price, in Italy?) taking separated directions, except aknowledge the priority of European supernational politics when it deals with destroying italian education system using the Bologna Process or contracting monstrous public works opposed by local population, like the Turin-Lyon high-speed rail.

Is it maybe quite simplistic to reduce the tangle of issues bridling the Old Continent into a language question? Maybe it is, but we have to admit that compared to our non-EC member neighbours, the Swiss, in Italy and maybe less in other European country, a federative spirit never set up, nor it was possible without an education aiming to understand other culture superficially different, as the European ones are.

The only effort promoted in Italian education in the last ten years addressed to the popularization of english language, while just north of the Alps it is quite normal for people to understand and speak fluently at least another of the language of the Confederacy.

Personally I don’t think that North of the Alps the DNA is much different from ours to facilitate the learning, but we can maybe talk about an educational project part of a political objective. This is where we fail. A common sense leading to the idea that learning at least another european language (beyond english, which is a simple secondary tool) is a necessary condition for European integration.

During the International Holocaust Remembrance Day we are reading that we, Italians, we think about our Schettino, while the Germans should think about their Auschwitz, easily forgetting, right during the International Holocaust Remembrance Day who helped and supported the nazis in pursuing the Final Solution plan. And still, right during the International Holocaust Remembrance Day we easily forget that Germany and the Germans did had the strenght to face their past, politically and culturally. While in Italy, the land where the warm sun shines, the land of the “good people” (italians refer to themselves usually as “brava gente”, meaning the “good people”), the matter of the fascism is faced at best as a sad digression in the national history, we never faced this “digression”, we preferred not to say, and in this silence we suddenly woke up in a land where northern leagues and fascism in local and national governments are shouting coarsely the worst fascist speeches of a rotten land.

I should end noticing the fact that the tragedy sought by the Costa Concordia was relevant and popular in German press because many Germans, among the middle class, come to Italy for this kind of tourism, mostly in a moment when tourism in Greece is not safe anymore.

And we shouldn’t be very surprised if Schettino is defined as a typical italian who wants to make an impression, but he’s ready to run away not to face a problem, because in very truth, we’ve read and heard contrymen telling the worst about the Neapolitan Schettino, not because he’s Mister Francesco Schettino, but because he’s a Neapolitan, those people didn’t notice that also Captain De Falco comes from Napoli.

And we cannot act surprised if, after twenty years of playing peekaboo, Carfagna ministers, prostitutes as niece of President Mubarak, Dell’Utri, Obama help me against communist judges, Germans understood a bit the meaning of an italian bow, but yet not its complete and real heaviness.

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