This focused, readable and important monograph traces the history of the Slovene minority in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia over the past 150 years. Robert Knight begins with a lament expressed by poet Urban Jarnik in 1826 that thousands of Slovenes had been absorbed over the centuries into German culture and no end seemed in sight. Yet unlike other Slavic groups that once vanished in culturally German seas of Pomerania, Lower Silesia, or what is now eastern Germany, the Slovene minority persists.
Yet the challenges have been tremendous and the assimilation often far from peaceful. During the Habsburg years, Slovene identity found a political structure in the Catholic People's Party, but that in the eyes of German liberals, socialists, or agrarians only made these “Wends” seem a backward sect particularly in need of German culture. An 1867 nationality law provided for bilingual education but was pushed back, and a wave of repression struck during WWI. Still, the conflict was not as severe as in the Czech lands, and among Slovene speakers a strong local patriotism prevailed, causing most to oppose inclusion in the Yugoslav state of 1918.
From 1938, the Nazi regime tried to smother Slavic identity by closing Slovene language schools and deporting Slovene nationalists, but after 1945 people asked what Austria should do to protect Slavic speakers after ravages bordering on genocide. The politician Joško Tischler came up with a plan to bypass the tricky question of who exactly belonged to the minority: every child in southern Carinthia would be educated in Slovene and German for the first four years, and then switch to German while maintaining Slovene as a compulsory subject. That would have represented historic justice and put an end to fears that Slovene might disappear entirely.
Yet before long resistance reared its head. Some Germans argued the arrangement would confuse the children; others said there were not enough teachers. But still, agreement persisted that knowing both languages was of benefit, and one socialist said that ignorance of Slavic languages had always been a misfortune for Germans. In October 1945 the provisional Carinthian government passed the provision.
Unfortunately, Tischler left his post, in part for his failure to gain support from Yugoslav separatists in Carinthia (the Liberation Front, OF), and bilingual education was marginalized. Two years later any leverage Yugoslavia had was extinguished in the Tito-Stalin feud, when the Soviet Delegation in Paris dropped Yugoslav's concerns about Croats and Slovenes in Austria.
On the ground in Austria, British authorities moved to consolidate the “western” camp, and because communists most vocally supported justice for crimes against Slovenes, efforts at restitution for wartime persecutions now took a back seat. Expellees who returned got compensation, but former Nazis flowed back into teaching, and a Carinthian patriotic association formed whose meetings reminded observers of prewar Nazi rallies. But now these “Nazis” counted as exemplary westerners because they opposed the OF and its efforts to cede territory to communist Yugoslavia.
The anti-Slavic fervor had culminated under Hitler, but obsessions about the Slavization of Austria went back decades, at least to 1867, when they united German and Hungarian liberals in support for the Compromise. In the 1950s, the agenda of pushing back Slavs on Austrian territory (!) brought together reds and blacks who had been divided for decades, and also found much sympathy among browns. Individual clerics gave blessings to old Darwinian notions, according to which the strong (Germans) must prevail. But now the Germans could simply be called Austrians, as an identity deeply insecure since Königgrätz got new underpinnings thanks to the persistence of this tiny “eastern” minority at the height of the Cold War.
The nadir of German-Austrian suppressing of Slavdom came in the late 1950s with a campaign to get parents to “deregister” children from bilingual education. As a result, by the summer of 1959 only 1,673 students remained signed up for bilingual education in a Slovene-speaking population of perhaps 40,000. Among the most fervid Germanizers were Austrians whose grandparents had spoken only Slovenian at home. Still, the “minority” survived, not as full nationality in a “Gellnerian” sense, but as an overlooked option, a preference, an enriching and complementary side of Carinthian and Austrian identity. Knight's eloquently argued book reveals points at which the Austrian state missed chances to treat this unbounded but definite group with basic respect, and should be read by anyone with concern for bi-and multi-cultural coexistence wherever it is endangered.
