Giovanni Moratelli, Italian
I’ve got the register of all the members of the Vienna Guild of Grinders in 1919. It reads like an Italian telephone book. There are only a few isolated
Austrian names, the rest are all Italians. In Vienna before the First World War there were well over a hundred knife grinders who all came from Rendenatal
in South Tyrol. ... My father was amongst them. At fourteen, in 1902, he left the valley with his two brothers and a grinder’s cart. ... that region
of South Tyrol was very poor then. Families tended to be rather large and the land could not feed them all. Someone had the idea of going around sharpening
scissors ... and there were so many who copied him ... that there was nothing left but to leave the valley. The grinders ... went either to Switzerland,
Austria or Bavaria and the rest of Germany. From Justino northwards they went to England or even North America ... My father and his two brothers took
eight months until they finally reached the imperial city of Vienna and because the area they came from belonged to Austria at the time, they were, of
course, Austrian citizens. My father couldn’t speak a word of German, so he always sang the national anthem in Italian ... they set up a small workshop
... And then the war came along and my father was conscripted in to the imperial army. He was wounded in Russia and he came back to Italy in a very round-about
way. There he was repatriated and in 1919 he returned to his business in Vienna. And he stayed Italian for the rest of his life. My father was born as
an Austrian in South Tyrol and died as Italian in Austria.
Walter Eckermann
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