"Ever since I was born, my mother has been crying.

She cries because my first word was a word.

She is crying because I speak the word and not Mama.” With this first-person narrator, “Mother tongue” begins, the first literary appearance of the twenty-nine-year-old Maddalena Fingerle.

An Italian with a difficult hometown, Bolzano, because it was autonomous and predominantly German.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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The South Tyrolean capital, divided into an old town and a fascist new town plus a sprawling commercial mash, is officially even trilingual – German, Italian and Ladin.

But who is really bilingual here?

It doesn't even work with the pronunciation: the South Tyrolean dialect speakers say "tue folte" when they want to say "due volte" (twice), the novel says.

It is the inconsistencies of this political construct that underpin Fingerle's book.

Bolzano, she says, would have had to be invented if it hadn't already existed.

And her book could not have been set anywhere else.

Although she no longer lives there.

But one after anonther.

The German surname goes back to a Munich great-grandfather.

Maddalena Fingerle, born in 1993, is the only daughter of two educated parents.

The mother teaches philosophy and history at a high school in Bolzano, the father was a lawyer.

The Roman grandmother makes sure that the granddaughter speaks neat Italian, not the Bolzano variant with the wrong intonations and strange vowels.

There are many books at home, but no television.

"My mother listened to the radio all day, Rai 3. Why a television, I thought to myself," said the author at the FAZ talks in Munich.

The woman in her late twenties with the long dark hair is dressed entirely in black, and she takes the same espresso.

One thinks one can see her flashes of inspiration, she is so lively and open-minded and occasionally of holy irresponsibility.

What's wrong with education?

They didn't have to be encouraged to read.

"My parents tried to prevent me from getting my hands on certain books.

I read 'Gattopardo' when I was ten, of course that was far too early,” she admits today.

After graduating from high school, she goes to Germany and ends up in Augsburg, where she doesn't understand three quarters of what the Bavarian-Swabian host family speaks.

The standard German she learned in Bozen turns out to be useless.

She practiced German with Thomas Mann and learned painfully that the Germans never stop with their sentences.

In order to counter the "Magic Mountain" with something contemporary, she watched "Sex and the City" in German.

She finds a German “tandem partner”, one practices the language of the other.

Today the two are a couple, live in the Allgäu, have just built a house, and now she owns – Fingerle is beaming – her first real bookshelf made by a carpenter, home for her 948 books.

Of course she lives in a bubble, she says with disarming nonchalance.

What's wrong with education?

And just because she comes from Bozen and now lives in the Allgäu doesn't mean she's a mountain lover.

Linguistic insecurities, which she attests to herself, are hardly noticeable.

After more than ten years in Germany, Fingerle speaks almost without an accent.