Always the funny waiter with a lot of amore? Those who have Italian roots are often put in the same box over and over again. What are the real stories? On a trip to Italy through Germany.
This story begins on December 20, 1955, when the German labor minister shakes hands with the Italian foreign minister. One signature, one agreement, millions of lives changing. The economy of the still young Federal Republic is booming. Italy, especially the south, is struggling with unemployment. Many Italians get on the trains at home and get off again in Wolfsburg, Stuttgart or Essen. They worked for years, for their families, for Germany.
After their work they would travel back, politicians thought, in the agreements there is talk of a rotation principle, other so-called “guest workers” should come. But this calculation does not work out. Why? The writer Max Frisch was best hit in 1965: “We called workers and people came.” These people not only worked hard, they also lived, they fell in love, they stayed. According to the Federal Statistical Office, the number of citizens of Italian origin in Germany in 2019 was around 873,000.
Aylin Esposito, 25, sits in a restaurant in Reutlingen, cuts a schnitzel and says that she is often mistaken for a Spanish woman. Esposito, with an emphasis on the “i”, sounds Spanish, the first “o” sounds Italian. She hardly speaks Italian and sometimes, in the past, it made her angry too. “Couldn’t you have raised me bilingual?” She asked her father. Her father then said that he had tried after all, had asked her in Italian and Aylin had sometimes stubbornly answered in German and sometimes not at all. So she recounts it. To this day, she still does not dare to speak Italian. The country, so it appears from her stories, is rather distant from her.
Italy in Germany: Where are the descendants of the former guest workers today?
As a child, she attended an Italian school once a week, like many children with an Italian immigration history. And like many other children, it has done her little. Most of the people there already knew a little Italian, Aylin didn’t: “That was bad for me, I was an outsider.” Your favorite place in Italy is South Tyrol.
When he was 16, her father moved from Sicily to Germany and worked in construction. The daughter explains that he always knew that he had to learn German. After work, he attended evening school near Reutlingen. At 17 he met Aylin Esposito’s mother, a German. He did an apprenticeship, today he is self-employed, trades in industrial goods, his mother also works in the small company. Esposito says that her mother now seems more Italian than her father. The family is doing well, vacationing several times a year, having their own house. “I think it’s crazy when you build something like that, from nothing to all of that” says Aylin Esposito and: “Just because you’re Italian doesn’t mean you have to have an ice cream parlor or a restaurant.”
Imagine a person living in Germany with an Italian immigration history. What are you thinking about? To the funny waiter in your favorite restaurant? Not bad, you are not alone. But Niels Zanotto, 22, is upset. His father runs a restaurant in Potsdam. Both want to show a new, modern image of Italy: “My father is not this Luigi host, with an apron that reaches to the floor and a gigantic pepper shaker in his hand.”
The Zanottos, father and son, want to start a company, modern Italian gastronomy. The idea: to break with Italian clichés. Niels Zanotto worked on the business plan until late at night.
Buonaseeeera, Adriano Celentano sings, pasta that tastes especially like garlic, Amore, Tiramisù, Dolce Vita and finally a limoncello on the house. This whole show, says Niels Zanotto at a meeting in Potsdam in the summer, is familiar to German tourists from their Italian vacation: “That annoys me, because that’s not the Italy I know.” It doesn’t match his childhood memories when he did , grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia, visited his father in the Veneto region: “For me, Italy was impressive and for the people I met in Germany, Italy was a gag.”
More than just a cliché waiter in an Italian restaurant
Earlier, when he was a child in Düren, he was confronted with Italy by his last name. No clichés that hurt, whine at a high level, “but still it sucks”. Verona, Milan, Padua, Venice, all modern cities, says Zanotto, modern people live there, nobody yells around in the bar. The Zanottos want to spread this in Germany, Niels calls it “fast forward Italy”. He travels to Italy as often as he can. The light is milder, he says, then the people, fancier than here, “a psychedelic experience”. He likes to live in Germany, but if you look around, in one of the richest countries in the world, he thinks: the people are not happy. Then the conversation is broken off: It starts to rain.
A phone call: Antonio Di Salvo, 42, is currently driving from Munich to Paderborn. He is the coach of the German U21 national team, very busy and on the road a lot. Both of his parents came to Germany from southern Italy, in 1970. They were not doing so well economically at the time, says Di Salvo. From warm Sicily to cold Paderborn. That’s where he grew up. His father, a football fanatic, put the son in a football club. There it was not the origin that counted, says Di Salvo, who has dual citizenship, but the performance. If you look at his current team, more than half of the players have a migration background. This interests him. He asks his players: where are your roots? What do you bring with you
With him, the majority is German. What happened to him was what happens to many people with an immigration history: “In Germany it was said: The Italian is playing. And when I was on vacation in Italy, I was the German. ”If you ask him about his Italian name and his origins, then that’s okay. “Those are my roots and the roots of my parents and there is nothing that could annoy me.” Everything could have turned out differently in his life. The parents actually intended to go back when he was supposed to go to school, says Di Salvo. “That just didn’t happen.”
With Nonna and Nonno it’s just different than with grandma and grandpa: Italian families in Germany
Today everything with his parents is a mix of Italian and German. When the grandchildren come to visit, they are amazed, with Nonna and Nonno it’s a bit different than with grandma and grandpa. “But that’s a good thing!” Says Di Salvo. When he thinks about how his parents came to Germany, how they built a good life and made friends, “then those are beautiful stories”. Di Salvo says that access to education and clubs is the most important thing. Integration works best through education and sport.
Speaking of integration. “I really shit that mom and dad weren’t allowed to vote in the federal election,” says 22-year-old Sofia Caputo. Her mother can only agree: “Yes, the subject hurts, we live here! So I’m getting naturalized now. “
Sophia’s mother Tina Bonaffini Caputo opened a pasta factory in Saarbrücken in February, with tagliatelle alongside olive oil and gin from Calabria in the shop. Marco Caputo, 46, her husband, came to Germany at the age of four. Both parents have roots in southern Italy. You speak perfect German, but you are Italian. Her son Aurelio, 17 *, goes to school, their daughter Sofia is studying psychology. Both speak hardly any Italian. The whole family has gathered in the pasta factory. It is discussed.
Sofia: “I have to say that we really take care of the family. I think that’s nice, but here in Germany everyone lives more individually. Then I also feel sorry if, for example, I can’t help here in the shop, mom. “
Tina: “In the past we weren’t even asked: Could you help?”
Sofia: “I think that’s really bad too. I want to help you, but for that I have to put my life back and I don’t want that. I don’t find that selfish either. I’m not doing nothing. I study, do an internship, work. “
Marco: “Isn’t that more of a generation issue than a nationality issue?”
Aurelio: “I actually refuse to help here too. I also have a tight schedule. “
Sofia: “I think my family works way too much.”
Marco: “But Italians don’t work as Germans any more!”
Sofia: “But Grandpa, for example, had to work hard, harder than other people, to open the restaurant.”
A classic guest worker, who came from Sicily in his early twenties, opened one of the first restaurants in the area for the grandpa Sofia Caputo speaks of. At a time when Italians were occasionally called “spaghetti eaters”.
Aurelio: “I am often approached about my appearance, but I don’t think that’s so bad, I feel completely German, I was born here, grew up here and go to school here.”
Marco: “Well, I didn’t experience any discrimination at all. Never. The citizens of Germany behaved in an exemplary manner, that was integration par excellence. “
Tina: “I think the Italian has no foreign character in Germany.”
The people who stayed: families with an Italian migration background
Sofia Caputo, the daughter, says she will soon be going on a longer stay abroad in Italy. Learning the language so that you can finally talk better to your grandparents. She doesn’t feel Italian, but neither does she feel German. At most European. Perhaps Marco Caputo, the father, is right when he says that it is also a question of generations. Italy, Germany, everything is changing. On this trip to Italy through Germany, everyone agrees on only one topic. Meal.
scholarship
Claudio Rizzello is a scholarship holder of the Karl Gerold Foundation.
The foundation was founded by long-time FR publisher and editor-in-chief Karl Gerold and regularly awards grants and travel grants to young journalists.
You can find more information about the scholarship and how to apply for it at: karl-gerold-stiftung.de
When it comes to eating, Sofia Caputo noticed most clearly that there was something Italian about her. “Then I say to friends: We can’t cook this like that, it just doesn’t work.”
Aylin Esposito says that when she eats, she too is Italian, loud, sometimes just chatting in between.
Antonio Di Salvo: “Italy is part of me, the family, the food. And I would also like to give my children a piece of Italy. When we grill at home, the bratwurst comes on the grill just like the salsiccia. “
Gastronomer Niels Zanotto says that people in Italy are happy because they know what they have there. “The sea in front of the door, the food tastes good.” Not a cliché.
