Tyrolese Dynamite

Tempestuous Berliners sought their favorite speisehausen (cafes) and pounded the tables till their steins jumped. "Schweinhund!" they bellowed. "Pig-dog! Derslueht MUSSOLINI!" With wrathful fingers of scorn, they pointed to the "cursed" Mussolini's declaration in the Italian Chamber (TIME, Feb. 15) that Italy intends to "rigorously, methodically and obstinately Italianize" the Alto Adige (the Germanic-Italian Tyrol), and that "Italy is ready if necessary to carry her banners beyond her present frontiers [at the Brenner Pass] but back never!"

Even as the Speisehause tables trembled, while many a platte of ripe Bavarian sausage crashed to the floor, the Deputies of the Reichstag were at work upon an official condemnation of Mussolini, which they voted amid angry gutteral acclaim:

"The German Reichstag vigorously rejects the Italian Prime Minister's objectively unjustifiable and insultingly phrased attacks and sneers....

"The German people will not permit themselves to be hindered from demanding just treatment of German minorities under foreign sovereignty. Least of all through insulting sneers and senseless threats...."

Stresemann Retorts. Foreign Minister Stresemann ascended the Reichstag Tribune, delivered the Cabinet's rebuke to Il Benito with ponderous almost unemotional thoroughness: "The German Government must decline to reply to Premier Mussolini in a tone which is better suited to mass meetings than to diplomatic conversation with other nations....

"Threats are incompatible with the spirit of the League of Nations...."*

"Premier Mussolini's speech is filled with arrogance, contradictions and vehemence, which attempt to hide the inner weakness of his argument....

"Germany has no means of interfering directly in the [Germanic] Italian Tyrol. Mussolini is quite right when he speaks of conditions there as a domestic matter. But Italy has the duty of protecting the German minority there. If out of a policy of oppression there arises international danger, an appeal to the League of Nations is in order....

"We are interested only in preventing insurmountable obstacles being placed in the way of unification of the German race. "In the name of the German Government, I scoff at these Italian threats."

Curtain Cord. While Germans rejoiced at their Government's declaration, there developed out of the affair, a notable scandal at the famed Film and Stage Supper Club, Berlin. The Marchesa Gabriele di Serra Mantschedda entered with two Italian actors and her sister, Maria Orska, the famed and darkly brilliant Russo-Polish actress, long popular in Berlin. While habitues whispered that the Marchesa's Italian husband had recently deserted her and that she was acting as her sister's business manager, she arose, strolled over to the orchestra and tipped the leader heavily to play an Italian Fascist song. Stepping from the seat of a gilt chair to the top of a table, she led the two Italian actors in a cheer for Mussolini....

Friends smuggled them out, somehow, while the German comedian, Eugene Bourg, incited a crowd of Berliners to chase them to their hotel. Later the same night Maria Orska quarreled with her sister, informed her that she could hardly carry on with so impolitic a business manager. Next morning the Marchesa di Serra Mantschedda was found swinging from the curtain cord of a window in her apartment. She had hanged herself.

Cannon Shots. Famed poet-patriot-playwright Gabriele d'Annunzio mounted to the prow of the desiccated Italian battleship Puglia, which the Fascist Government has had placed upon the lawn of his estate at Lake Garda, Italy. From that vantage point he exulted in the threats which Mussolini had loosed at Rome. Raising his right arm straight before him at an angle of 45 degrees (the Fascist salute), he gave the signal for a salute of 27 guns, which promptly boomed from the cannon of the Puglia... Then he telegraphed "congratulations from the prow of the Puglia" to Mussolini.

Benito Retorts. While the Italian Senate seethed about him in expectant approval of whatever he might be going to say, Mussolini mounted the Tribune: "The long and tortuous speech of Stresemann makes it necessary for me to make an immediate reply, which shall be clean and precise, like the speech I made in the Chamber last Saturday....

"Few declarations have had such rapid and profound repercussions in the hearts of the Italians and in European public opinion as my speech. This shows that such a speech was necessary to clarify a situation that was becoming more and more troublesome.

"That speech was not improvised; it was patiently?I repeat, patiently?thought out during two months of ignoble anti-Italian uproar....

"I confirm in the spirit and the letter my former speech, including the final allusion to the Italian flag on the Brenner Pass, which Stresemann can interpret as he will, but which Italians interpret in the sense that Italy will never submit to the violation of treaties of peace which guarantee their frontiers conquered at such a heavy price of blood....

"I declare in the most explicit manner: 1) That the alien population of the Upper Adige is outside of those minorities which were the object of special accord in the peace treaties. 2) That Italy will not engage in any discussion of that matter by any Assembly or Council. 3) That the Fascist Government will react with the greatest energy against all plans of such a nature.

"These my keynotes!"

The Fascist organ L'Impero cried: "The Mussolini-Stresemann tilt was a dialog between an Eagle and a Crow?an encounter between Rapier and Paunch."

*See LEAGUE for an account of Herr Stresemann's transmission of the official German application for League membership.