SOUTHEASTEUROPE SERIESVol. XXII No. 4

(Austria)

NATIONALISMTODAY: CARINTHIA’S SLOVENES

Part I: The Legacy ofHistory

by Dennison I. Rusinow

October 1977

The bombsmostly destroying OsvobodilnaFronta or AbwehrMimpfer monumentshave beentoo small and too few and have done too littledamage to earn much international attention in thisage of ubiquitous terrorism in the name of someideological principle or violated rights. Moreover,the size of the national minority in question, thequality of their plight, and the potentially widerAustrian and international repercussions ofthe con-flict all pale into insignificance alongside the prob-lems of the Cypriots, of the Northern Irish, of theBasques, of the Palestinian and Overseas Chinesediasporas, of the non-Russian peoples of the SovietUnion, or ofmany others. Despite these disclaimers,however, the problem of the Carinthian Slovenes isworth examining for more than its local andbilateral Austro-Yugoslav importance. It is, aboveall, a particularly tidy and suggestive case study oftwo intimately related questions that are now andagain of worldwide concern and that historicallyfirst became acute precisely in this and similarlymultinational provinces of the Hapsburg Empire.The first of these is what Central Europeans call"the national question," involving the nature andsignificance of nationality and nationalism and theinherent contradiction between the ideology of thenation-state and the existence ofmultinational ones.The second combines an empirical and a value ques-tion: under what circumstances will a national (--ethnic? linguistic? cultural?) minority tend (a) tosurvive while integrating in other ways and pros-pering, (b) to survive at the price of social immobilityin a ghetto or on a reservation, or (c) to disappearthrough some form of assimilation? And does it(always? sometimes?) matter if it disappears?

Austria’s Carinthia is one of those provinceslike Alsace and prewar Posnania, Bohemia, or WestHungarywhere the German world comes gradu-ally to an end and becomes something else. Here the

other world is Slovene, and in the valleys of Carin-thia, the two peoples and cultures have been mixedfor more than eleven hundred years. Until the"national awakening" of the nineteenth century,nobody seems to have minded. Then came the Slo-vene renaissance and claims to cultural and socialequality for Slovenes qua Slovenes, backed by theshadows of Austro-Slavism, South-(Yugo-)Slavism,and pan-Slavism. The German Carinthians, feelingthreatened in their thousand-year cultural, political,and economic dominance on the borderland,reacted with a passion that became obsessive andthat was to culminate in Nazi attempts duringWorld War II to eradicate the Slovene Carinthiansthrough a combination of forcible assimilation andpopulation transfers. Meanwhile, the logic of thenation-state ideology and the inclusion after 1918 ofneighboring and totally Slovenian Carniola in a newkingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugo-slavia) also brought Slovenian irredentist claims toCarinthia’s ethnically mixed districts. Here, too, theculmination was violent, bringing two short-livedYugoslav military occupations of the southern halfofthe province, in 1919-20 and 1945.

Today the dispute focuses on Austrian nonimple-mentation of specific and international obligations,designed to protect the existence and guarantee theequality of the Carinthian Slovenes, that are part ofthe State Treaty which ended Four Power occupa-tion and restored Austrian sovereignty in 1955. Fortwo decades the implementation of these provisionshas been blocked by an unresolvable disagreementover the superficially curious issue of the relevanceand need for some kind of head count (Minder-heitenfestellung) to determine how many Slovenesthere are and where they live. First proposed by theprincipal Carinthian German nationalist organiza-tion in 1957, such a head count was eventuallyendorsed by all three of Austria’s parliamentary

Copyright (C) 1977, American Universities Field Staff, Inc.

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partiesboth government and oppositionas aprecondition for the introduction of bilingual topo-graphic signs, Slovenian as a second language incourts and local administration, the definitive regu-lation of bilingual schools, and other measuresstipulated by the State Treaty. On the other side thetwo officially recognized Slovenian political andcultural organizations in the province, backed bythe Yugoslav government, have vehemently andcontinually refused to accept its need or legitimacy,opposed its execution when it finally came inNovember 1976, and are now refusing to recognizethe results as a basis for settlement.

Each item in the history summarized above playsa role in explaining and giving significance to thisdispute and to the positions assumed by all theseactors. Relevant items include such apparentlyesoteric questions as the language spoken by theman who sat on the ancient stone throne on theCarinthian Zollfeld in the early eighth century andthe ethnographic and linguistic validity of the con-cept ofa Windisch or Wend people.

Slavs and Germans in the Valley ofthe Drau

Carinthia itself is worth fighting over. For mytaste it is Austria’s loveliest province. Its many lakesare the warmest in all the Alps, and there is some-thing about the ratio between the shape of its wide,glacially U-formed valleys and the height and massof its mou.ntains that is particularly pleasing to thisobserver’s soul. It is also, significantly, one of themost completely enclosed ofthe AustrianLinder. Inthe northwest corner rises the Grossglockner, at3,798 meters Austria’s highest mountain and prideof the High Tauern, a west-to-east prolongation ofthe main backbone of the Alps that cuts thesesouthern valleys off from Tyrol, Salzburg, UpperAustria, and north winds. In the south theKarawanken Alps, another west-to-east range,raises a massive, steep-sided barricade betweenCarinthia and Yugoslav Carniola (gradients on theLoibl Pass road, now avoidable through a tunnel,exceed 22 percent). The Karawanken’s westwardextension in the Carnic Alps, beyond the narrowTarvis Gap that is eastern Austria’s only all-weatherroute to Italy, similarly bars the passage to Friuli.Through the middle of this land, giving it hydro-graphic and geographic unity, flows the river Drau(Drava to the Slavs and to the Italians who command

its source just inside South Tyrol), and in the south-east where the Drau crosses into present-day Yugo-slavia, the mountains surrender to the greatPannonian Plain. Only here and to the northeastand east, where the passes into Styria and towardVienna are lower and more numerous, is Carinthiaeasily accessible.

This geographic configuration, open to the eastover yielding mountains and to the southeast alongthe Drau, but barely accessible in all otherdirections, has been important in the history ofCarinthia and of the national question. TheSlovenes came from the east in the second half of thesixth century, driven before the conquering Avars toan apparently bloodless occupation of valleys eitheruninhabited or sparsely populated by a mixture ofRomanized (Celtic?) peoples and dropouts(Langobards? Goths?) from earlier barbarianmigrations. The High Tauern and the Carnic Alpsimposed western limits on their penetration, whilethe eastward thrusting Karawanken split theirmigration into two streams and thereafter impededcommunication between those who settled in theLjubljana Basin to the south and those who followedthe Drau into the Klagenfurt Basin to the north ofthis mountain barrier. By the time of Charlemagnethe German Bajuvarii had come, too---both assettlers filtering across the high passes into northernCarinthia and as a Bavarian king’s vassals who weresummoned by Slovene appeals for help against theAvars and who stayed to rule. Carinthia became aBavarian tributary state and with Bavaria passedinto the Frankish Empire. As an autonomousGerman duchy, for a brief time including Styria,Carniola, Istria, Friuli, and the March of Verona, itwas part of the Ottonian Empire and then ofOttokar’s short-lived realm. Finally in 1335, bothCarinthia and Carniola passed to the Hapsburgs, tobe joined with Styria after the fifteenth century asthe "Inner Austrian" lands of the Styrian branch ofthe House ofHapsburg.

Whoever may be right about the nationality of thefirst man to sit on that stone throne on the Zollfeldby the Karnburg north of Klagenfurt, by the end ofthe eighth century he was a German. But evencenturies later, in a curious tradition apparentlyunique in feudal Europe, each new duke was wel-comed there by a Slovene peasantan honorhereditary in one familywho heard his oath to be ajust ruler spoken in the Slovene language before

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yielding the throne to him.a In this fashion, and formore than a millennium, German lords andGerman monasteries ruled a Slav peasantry whowere almost alone among the peoples of CentralEurope in never having had an independent and atleast momentarily powerful state to remember.

In Carniola, lower Styria, and southern Carinthiaan ethnic pattern familiar throughout the easternHapsburg domains emerged: a countryside of Slavpeasants speckled with German market and admin-istrative towns to which a few ambitious Slavs ineach generation came.., and were Germanized. Innorthern Carinthia, however, the German peasantsalso multiplied, spread southward to and across theDrau, mixed with the Slovenes in blissful mutualunawareness of the importance of nationality, andadded German cultural to political hegemony in thecountryside as well as in the towns. They and theirSlovene neighbors both referred to the latter asWends (Wenden, here more commonly Windisch),an ancient German name for any and all Slavs, fromthe Baltic to the Adriatic. Only later did Windischbecome first a term of ethnic disparagement andthen a designation for what German nationalistsalleged was a separate Carinthian nationality, dis-tinct from the Slovenes of Carniola and LowerStyria.

Slovene Awakening and German Reaction

The "national question" came to Carinthia in theearly nineteenth century, as it did to other parts ofthe Hapsburg Empire, in the form of a "Slavawakening" encouraged by Slovene priests and aninitially small number of intellectuals who rejectedthe idea that to become urban or to rise in the worldrequired one to cease being a Slovene. The ensuing"Slovene renaissance" was characterized by a lin-guistic revival, again like analogous movementselsewhere in the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires,and by the spread of Slovene-language primaryeducation in the countryside, here on a scaleunequaled by most other such movements. Astrategy reflecting a synthesis of nationalist ideologyand Enlightenment views of education as the meansto liberty and progress, at least in Carniola it had bythe end of the century created an unusual entity inthe world of that time: an almost totally literatepeasant nation.

German nationalists claim that only with this"Slav awakening" did Slovenian become a literary

(written) language for the first time. This is notstrictly true, since there had been a Slovene trans-lation of the Bible and a modest flowering of Slo-venian books during a "first Slovene renaissance"that coincided with the Reformation’s brief triumphin Inner Austria in the sixteenth century. But theHapsburg Counterreformation put an end to allthis, and for over 200 years no books were publishedin Slovenian. The linguistic revival after 1800therefore included a significant amount ofupdating, new vocabulary, and purging of non-Slavic loan wordsmostly German or corruptedGerman and sometimes forms long obsolete in theGerman language, further evidence of the antiquityof linguistic and cultural mixing. The product,henceforth the Slovenian literary language(Schriftslowenisch to the Germans), was then taughtin the new Slovenian schools springing up on bothsides of the Karawanken and frequently sponsoredin ethnically disputed districts by the South SlavSociety of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, anothercharacteristic instrument of the nationalities con-flict in the monarchy. Virtually unchallenged inCarniola and generally successful in Lower Styria,the activities of the South Slav Society and of otherSlovenian cultural nationalists were confronted by aserious rival in Carinthia. This was the GermanSchool League and its successor, the German SchoolLeague of the Southern March (Deutsche Schul-verein Siidmark), founded in 1880 to defendGerman schools in beleaguered towns and to sub-sidize the creation in mixed and Slovene districts of"ultraquist" schools, in which "Windisch" was usedin the first grades to ease the transition to German asexclusive language of instruction in higher ones. By1918 there were 35 such schools, against 3 Slovenelanguage ones, in southern Carinthia.a

The German towns of Carniola and Lower Styriawere one by one transformed into Slovene townsunder the combined pressure of rural-urban migra-tion from exclusively Slav hinterlands and Slav edu-cation. North of the Karawanken, however, whereGerman towns could draw from a German as well asa Slav rural populace as they grew, and where thelatter had often learned German in "ultraquist"schools or from German landowners or neighbors,such conversion of urban centers did not take place.Thus, while the Carinthian Slovenes contributedtheir share of talent to the "national renaissance,"that talent tended to migrate south to Ljubljana,which was now the Slovene cultural center, rather

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than to predominantly German Klagenfurt. Theconsequences of all these developments included arelative cultural weakening of Slovenian Carinthia,where literate Slovene peasants could usually readand write only in German and "nationally con-scious" urban Slovenes were rare. They also in-cluded a growing gulf between the five Windischdialects of Carinthia and those spoken in Carniola,which were gradually altered and unified by the nowwidespread teaching ofSchriftslowenisch. Today, asa result, Carinthian Windisch and the Slovenianliterary language are at times mutually incompre-hensible, a fact exploited since 1920 by those whoargue that Carinthian"Wends" are in some sense aseparate nationality and that only those CarinthianSlavs who speak Schriftslowenisch (generallysynonymous with those known to themselves and inYugoslavia as "nationally conscious Slovenes") arereally Slovenes.One other aspect of more remote history deserves

mention for its contemporary relevance. TheReformation and Counterreformation, in additionto their relationship to the rise and fall of the "firstSlovene renaissance," assumed a particularcharacter in Carinthia that is generally held to be thesource of certain peculiarities in the political profileof the province’s German-speaking majority fourcenturies later. Protestantism, briefly triumphant inmuch of Austria late in the sixteenth century, seemsto have struck exceptionally deep roots along theDrau valley before the Emperor’s hussars eradi-cated it with their bayonets. Even today there areproportionately more Protestants in Carinthia thanin any other part of overwhelmingly CatholicAustria; most of them live in the higher valleys, aphenomenon explained in local folk history by theobservation that seventeenth-century Imperialcavalry could not operate above the thousand-meterlevel. The memory of the form and brutality of theirre-Catholicization lived on among the Catholicmajority in the shape of unusually widespread andintense anticlericalism. The political consequences(if indeed there is a causal connection, since thethesis presented here is disputed by some historiansand political sociologists) emerged in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. Before the rise of modernmass parties in the 1880s, anticlerical Germanliberalism tended to be the creed of GermanAustria’s urban middle classes and the clericalistConservative Party tended to dominate in ruralareas, but most of Carinthia’s country gentry, vil-lagers, and farmers were atypically liberal. Later,

when these premodern parties had been replaced bythe three "camps" that still divide Austrians polit-icallyChristian Social (today’s People’s Party),Socialist, and Greater German Nationalist (whosedirect heir is today’s Liberal Party)--peasants andgentry elsewhere flocked to the Christian Socialstandard. In Carinthia, however, these same classeswere predominantly German Nationalist, and pur-portedly as much because the German NationalParty was anticlerical as because it was nationalist.In this situation, and again for anticlerical as well asnational reasons, it was natural that Carinthiashould in due course produce a disproportionatelylarge number of Austrian Nazis. But after WorldWar II, when the old German Nationalist camp inits liberal reincarnation shrank to less than 7percent of the electorate and most ex-Nazis andothers of nationalist sentiment sought refuge in thePeople’s Party or among the socialists, it was less"natural"except in the light of this historythatin Carinthia, alone among Austrian provinces, theSocialist Party got most of them. The consequencesofthis anomaly for the Slovene question in the 1970swill emerge later.

Civil War and the Plebiscite

The collapse ofthe Hapsburg Empire in 1918 andthe creation of Yugoslavia transformed the nationalquestion in Carinthia and Styria from a struggleamong ethnic groups for cultural and politicaldominance within each of these provinces into aterritorial question between states. As the PeaceConference assembled in Paris in December 1918,Slovenes from the disbanding Austro-Hungarianarmy, supported by Serbian regular units, hastenedto bolster with a military occupation their claim thatat least southern Carinthia, including the province’sprincipal and undoubtedly German towns ofKlagenfurt (Celovec) and Villach (Bejak), should bepart of their new state. German Carinthians, alsoreturning from the front, defied warnings about thene.w Austrian Republic’s nervous Provincial Gov-ernment in Vienna and took up arms again. Civilwar ensued. An armistice was negotiated throughAmerican mediation in mid-January and lasteduntil the end of April 1919. Then, with theCarinthian question still unresolved as the Treaty ofSt. Germain entered the final drafting stage (LowerStyria, with only two predominantly German townsleft in a solidly Slovene countryside, was to go toYugoslavia), hostilities began again on a more

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serious scale. After some initial successes, theGermanAbwehrkampferwere driven back, and theYugoslavs occupied Klagenfurt. The Peace Confer-ence intervened again, imposed a new armistice, andordered the holding of a plebiscite in the disputedarea. The Yugoslavs were forced to withdraw fromKlagenfurt, but were left in occupation of most ofthe rest oftheir claim pending the vote.

In recognition of the military situation and theethnic map, the disputed area was divided into twozones. Immediately north and east of theKarawanken, in the districts known to contain mostof the Slovenes and under Yugoslav occupation,Zone A included the market centers of V51kermarkt(Velikovec) and Bleiburg (Pliberk), the purely Slo-venian Alpine valleys around Zell (Sele), and thepredominantly Slovene Rosenthal (Ro). If theplebiscite here should result in a majority forYugoslavia, a second plebiscite would be held inZone B to the north, including Klagenfurt andVillach. But if the vote in Zone A were favorable toAustria, no plebiscite would be held in Zone B,which meanwhile remained under Austrian admin-istration.

The plebiscite in Zone A was held on October 10,1920, under Allied supervision. Despite claims tothe contrary still commonly heard in Yugoslavia,there seems no doubt that it was fairly conducted,although both sides had waged a vigorous propa-ganda campaign and brought to bear such pressuresas they could, fair and foul (since the zone had beenunder Yugoslav occupation since the spring of 1919,undue Austrian pressure could hardly be alleged).The result: 22,025 people, 59 percent of the all-maleelectorate, turned in the green ballot for Austria. Itwas clear, as both sides still agree today, that a largenumber of Slovenes had voted against union withtheir kinsmen in the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats,and Slovenes. The Yugoslavs reluctantly evacuatedthe zone, taking many of their most active partisanswith them, including 32 teachers and 28 priests.Except for two small districts south and east of theKarawanken that the Peace Conference had alreadygranted to Yugoslavia without a plebiscite,Carinthia remained undivided and Austrian

There seem to have been several reasons why somany Carinthian Slovenes voted for Austria ratherthan for Yugoslaviaan outcome that the Yugoslavnegotiators in Paris had privately expected, despite

their conviction that the majority of the affectedpopulation was Slav, when they opposed the PeaceConference’s decision to hold a plebiscite.4 Onereason was economic and in turn geographic. TheAustrians (and also the Yugoslavs, when they origi-nally tried to claim all of the province) had mademuch of the alleged "indivisibility" of Carinthia onthese grounds. It was a good point, and one that thevoters were well aware of. A frontier along or nearthe Drau, which American experts supported at onestage in 1919, would isolate people living south ofthat line from all population, cultural, and marketcenters, since Klagenfurt and Villach would becomeforeign, beyond a customs border, while theKarawanken would still block their access to anyalternative Yugoslav centers. The behavior ofSerbian troops and administrators occupying ZoneA also seems to have played a role, which was eagerlydramatized in German nationalist propaganda, forit could be experienced as an unpleasant foretaste oflife in a Serb-dominated and thus quasi-barbarianBalkan kingdom if one voted for Yugoslavia. Inaddition, and also a favorite theme of Germanpropaganda, there was compulsory military servicein Yugoslavia (perhaps to be performed in darkestMacedonia!), but none in republican Austria.

Finally, and just possibly the most important, the"indivisibility" of Carinthia had (and has) another,noneconomic, meaning. Encouraged by oldAustrian traditions of provincial political and cul-tural autonomy but expressed with even greaterintensity than elsewhere, perhaps because their landis geographically so self-contained, most Carin-thians of any nationality apparently think of them-selves as Carinthians first. German, Slovene, Yugo-slav, or (especially rarely, even now!) Austrian are atbest secondary forms of self-identification. TheViennese is a highly suspect foreigner to the GermanCarinthian, and the Carniolan as well as the Serb isequally an alien to his Slovene neighbor. The validityof this generalization and the importance I tend toattribute to it, both on the basis of unsystematicpersonal observations and reading the German andSlovenian Carinthian press over the years, find sup-port in the conclusions of an internationally knownAustrian social psychologist, Professor WilfriedDaim. Writing about the plebiscite in a study ofattitudinal aspects ot today’s Carinthian problem,Daim points out that those Slovenes who did vote forYugoslavia were no more "unpatriotic" or anti-Austrian than the majority of their German

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Austrian contemporaries, who at that time wantedunion with Germany. As for those who voted forAustria"

Here the feeling of belonging to a territorywith a long history, a feeling that is verystrong and alive among the population,should also be emphasized. A thousand yearsago Carinthi (to be sure much larger thantoday) was the first Dukedom on the soil ofpresent day Austria, and a rich historicaltradition has encouraged the growth here ofa patriotism for which the integrity ofCarinthia’s borders has often been moreimportant than any movement towardnational unification. "Loyalty to the home-land" [Heimattreu] could be understood inthis or that way after 1918, when all frontierswere in flux. But it is certain that, alongside agreat variety of other motives, this one aboveall led many Slovenes to vote for Austria in1920.

What it all adds up to, in a phrase popular amongYugoslav and Carinthian Slovene politicians andpolitical sociologists, is that in 1920 the CarinthianSlovenes were by and large "not nationally con-scious.’; That is, many and perhaps most of themvoted on the basis of other than national or ethniccriteria. To arouse the "dormant national con-sciousness" of these people has ever since been anobjective ofgovernments in Ljubljana and Belgrade,whether royal or communist, and of already"nationally conscious" Slovenes on both sides of theKarawanken. Why they feel this to be so important,why it has been so difficult, and what has happenedin consequence explain conflicting Slovene andGerman nationalist attitudes to this year’s disputedethnic census and are the themes of Parts II and IIIofthis series.

From the First Republic to Hitler and Tito

Before and immediately after the plebiscitetriumph of 1920, Austrian federal and Carinthianprovincial authorities promised the Slovenem.nority full protection, in accordance with clausesin the Treaty of St. Germain requiring suchmeasures. Only a month after the plebiscite, how-ever, Provincial Governor Arthur Lemisch, in astatement before the Carinthian Assembly that isquoted with expectable regularity by Sloveniannationalists today, referred to the 41 percent ofZoneA’s voters who had preferred Yugoslavia in termsthat suggested a different policy preference: "We

have only one lifetime to lead these misguidedpeople back to Carinthianism [sic]; the task of re-education must be completed within the span of onegeneration!" Here were both the thesis andantithesis that have shaped the dialectic of theSlovenian minority’s destiny for nearly 50 years.

The first chapter in this story is a tale of ten yearsofnegotiations over legislation to establish "culturalautonomy" for the minority, with each sidecontinually accusing the other ofbad faith. On May27, 1931 the provincial legislature’s school commis-sion declared further efforts to be in vain, blamingthe intransigence of the Slovene leaders, and thedebate ended. Slovene spokesmen still use this de-cision as evidence of permanent bad faith on thepart of Austrian authorities, but the evidence seemsto indicate that at least the provincial and federalgovernmentsin contrast to local private national-ist groups with considerable influencehad made asincere effort. Slovene cultural societies, periodi-cals, and a powerful and efficient Slovene coopera-tive movement continued to exist, relatively un-hampered, through the period of the Dolfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship. The situation was evenbetter, or at least the Slovenes thought it was, in thefirst years after the Anschluss, Nazi officialdomhaving promised the minority greater autonomythan they had enjoyed under the Austrian Republic.On the other hand, the failure of the negotiationsover "cultural autonomy" left the minority withoutSlovene schools, "ultraquist" schools did not teachthe Slovenian literary language, and the bilingualpublic signs that had been tokens of official recog-nition of binationalism in Hapsburg times werepainted over leaving German only. Census figures,however otherwise inaccurate and misleading,7 aremute witnesses to the fact that pressures on theminority, whether social, official, or self-inflicted,continued. The last Imperial census of 1910 hadcounted 74,210 Slovenes on the territory of post-1918 Carinthia, as surely an undercounting as the124,000 claimed in Yugoslav presentations to thePeace Conference was an exaggeration. In the nextcensus, and the first under the Republic, taken in1923 this figure was down to 39,292, and in that of1934 there were apparently only 26,796 Slovenes inthe province. The nature of the reasons for such arapid decline in reported numbers under the FirstRepublic becomes ironically even clearer when onenotes that the next census, taken in 1939 during thepostoAnschluss Nazi-Slovene honeymoon, registered42,000 as speaking some variant of Slovene.

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The German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941brought an abrupt end to the uneasy peace in Nazi-Slovene relations. Northern Carniola was annexedto the Reich and to Carinthia and placed underGauleiter Friedrich Rainer in Klagenfurt. Almostall Slovene priests on both sides of the Karawankenwere promptly arrested; some were later releasedunder pressure from the Bishop’s Ordinariat inKlagenfurt, but only in return for an episcopalpromise to remove them to German-speaking areasand to replace them with German priests who---itwas explicitly stated were to know no Slovene.Some 272 Slovene families were forcibly removed tonorthern Germany and their farms were given toGerman immigrants. These were the first steps in aplan, approved in Berlin, for a "definitive solution"to the minority problem.

In charge of such operations, under GauleiterRainer, was SS-Standartenf’dhrer Alois Maier-Kaibitsch, for many years before the war the head ofthe German nationalist Kiirntner Heimatdienst(literally "Carinthian Homeland Service"), foundedduring the 1919 civil war and to be refounded in1957 to "continue the struggle." Much more will besaid about the contemporary Heimatdienst in PartII ofthis series: it is worth noting here, however, thatwhen I first visited Carinthia and interviewed thenleaders of the Heimatdienst in 1960, almost all wereformer friends and colleagues of Maier-Kaibitsch,who had died a few years earlier while serving a lifesentence for his wartime activities. While theyinsisted there was "nothing Nazi" about the newHeimatdienst, they remembered Maier-Kaibitschwith affection, defended his and their own recordsduring the war with passion, and were happy to giveme introductions to his and Gauleiter Rainer’swidows. Because of the psychological as well aspolitical importance ofsuch continuity in explaining

the attitude of the minority, a lecture delivered byMaier-Kaibitsch on July 10, 1942, outlining thetasks before the Carinthians "now that we are partofthe Reich," is also worth quoting"

The events of the last years in the Balkanshave given us the possibility ofputting an endto the so-called Slovenian minority in thearea north of Karawanken Securitymeasures required at that time, among otherthings, the imprisonment of some Sloveneleaders in the former bilingual zone; otherswere banished from the Gau. We trust there-fore that the small number ofthose who sincethe 1939 census claimed to be Slovenes willnow realize the facts and understand ourwarnings and invitations The use of theWindisch colloquial language must ceaseonce and for all even in private intercourse...this must be achieved by all means. OnlyGerman inscriptions can be put in churches,on flags, crosses, on the gravestones in ceme-teries. It is everybody’s task to report to theGaubureau, Section for Nationality Ques-tions, all inscriptions in Windisch... Sloveneliterature must be confiscated and disappearfrom use. All party and state institutionshave to issue strict instructions that onlyGerman may be spoken,a

In this same lecture Maier-Kaibitsch expressedconcern that the liquidation of the frontier on theKarawanken through the annexation of northernCarniola could make his task more difficult byopening the way for the Slovenes of Carniola tosupport the minority in Carinthia. This was in factalready happening in a more drastic and dramatic.form than he anticipated. The Osvobodilna Frontaza Slovensko Korogki (Liberation Front for Slo-venian Carinthia) is still proudly rememberedinappropriate circlesas the first and only militarilysignificant armed anti-Nazi resistance movement onthe soil of the Third Reich itself. Although in somemeasure autonomous, it was essentially an Austrianbranch of the Osvobodilna Fronta (OF), Tito’sPartisans, in Yugoslav Slovenia to the south. Likethe parent OF, the Carinthian Partisans were a com-munist-dominated coalition of all antifascist forces,including a strong contingent from the left wings ofthe prewar Catholic parties on both sides of thefrontier, and in Carinthia the OF also recruited arespectable number of German Austrians whowished to fight Nazism or the Anschluss. Dr. JoeTischler, the Chairman of the Carinthian OF afterthe war, who was to be given a place in theProvisional Carinthian Government recognized by

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the British occupation authorities in 1945, and whois still an important figure in minority politics, camefrom the movement’s Christian wing.

Much has been made by both sides of theCarinthian OF record. For its veterans and othermembers of the minority, its staunch anti-Nazismand its sacrifices, successes, and unique armed re-sistance within the Reich merited special considera-tion by the victorious Allies and still merit therespect of all "democratic" Austrians. For manyGerman Corinthians this same record is furtherproof that the new Yugoslavia, even and worse yet acommunist Yugoslavia, will use force to takeAustrian territory ifgiven a chance. More importantstill is the record ofthe last months of the war, whenunits from Yugoslavia, by then formally part ofMarshal Tito’s new Yugoslav People’s Army,crossed the old frontier to join hands with theCarinthian OF in an apparent repeat ofRoyal Yugo-slavia’s 1919 attempt to anticipate the decisions of apeace conference by occupying what they claimed.In the process Nazi atrocities were answered withcommunist ones, including the abduction and dis-appearance into Yugoslavia ofabout 300 CarinthianGermans and Slovenes, largely former leaders of thepro-Austrian campaign of 1919-20 in Zone A. And,although not directly related to the Carinthian ques-tion, the fact that the surrender to the Partisans andsubsequent "death march" ofthe retreating army ofthe Nazi-sponsored and ill-famed IndependentState of Croatia began on Carinthian soil, atBleiburg, has permitted that bloodiest act ofrevengein Titoist history to be co-opted into Carinthianmemories and into Heimatdienst claims thatGerman Nazi oppression was more than cancelledout by Slav communist terror.

As his forces moved into former Zone A, Tito’sgovernment presented to the Allies a demand thatYugoslavia be allowed to participate in the occupa-tion of Austria by taking over Carinthia, which hadbeen assigned to the British Zone, pending a settle-ment of the frontier question. The British ForeignOffice and American State Department replied thatthe frontier question was indeed open, but that forthis very reason they could not accede to the Yugo-slav request. Nevertheless it took from April 2 (thedate ofthe Yugoslav note) until May 19, 1945 for theAnglo-American authorities, through a series ofincreasingly sharply worded diplomatic notes, toobtain a Yugoslav evacuation ofAustrian territory_

The Yugoslavs continued to press their claims. In1949, however, the Foreign Ministers of Austria’s

Article 7

Rights ofthe Slovene and Croat Minorities

1. Austrian nationals of the Slovene and Croatminorities in Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styriashall enjoy the same rights on equal terms as allother Austrian nationals, including the right to theirown organizations, meetings, and press in their ownlanguage.

2. They are entitled to elementary instruction in theSlovene or Croat language and to a proportionalnumber of their own secondary schools; in thisconnection school curricula shall be reviewed and asection of the Inspectorate of Education shall beestablished for Slovene and Croat schools.

3. In the administrative and judicial districts ofCarinthia, Burgenland, and Styria, where there areSlovene, Croat, or mixed populations, the Slovene orCroat language shall be accepted as an official lan-guage in addition to German. In such districts topo-graphical terminology and inscriptions shall be inthe Slovene or Croat language as well as in German.

4. Austrian nationals of the Slovene and Croatminorities in Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styriashall participate in the cultural, administrative, andjudicial systems in these territories on equal termswith other Austrian nationals.

5. The activity of organizations whose aim is todeprive the Croat or Slovene population of theirminority character or rights shall be prohibited.

four occupying powers (U.S.S.R., United States,Britain, and France), meeting in Paris to draft anAustrian State Treaty and deadlocked on otherissues, decided that Austria should retain its 1937boundaries unaltered. By then, a year after theoutbreak of the great Soviet-Yugoslav quarrel, eventhe Soviet Union had lost interest in supportingYugoslav pretensions. And in 1955, when the StateTreaty including this clause was finally signed, theYugoslavs acceded to the Treaty and thus legallyabandoned their claim.

Since that time Yugoslav government and theSlovene organizations in Carinthia have maintainedthat they are no longer interested in annexation byYugoslavia, but only in the protection of the

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minority within Austria and increased culturalcontacts across the Karawanken. German national-ists maintain that this is only tactically disguisedirredentism, and the Carinthian "Titoists," at least,have not always been very convincing in theirdenials.

The State Treaty also contains two articlesdrafted by the Big Four Foreign Ministers at thesame 1949 meeting at which they agreed not to alterthe prewar Austro-Yugoslav frontier in favor ofYugoslaviawhich internationalize the status andtreatment ofAustria’s ethnic minorities. The first ofthese, Article 6, refers in general terms to the usuallist of "human rights and fundamental freedoms,"enjoining Austria to "take all measures necessary"to insure their enjoyment by "all persons underAustrian jurisdiction, without distinction as to race,sex, language, or religion"; it alsb prohibits lawsthat discriminate among Austrian citizens on thebasis of such distinctions. The second and more fre-quently cited, Article 7, refers explicitly to the state’stwo South Slav minorities and to the three provincesin which they live, committing the republic to a set ofspecific and positive acts designed to guarantee theirexistence as a national minority and equality ascitizens. Those listed are the Slovenes of Carinthiaand Styria, the latter so few in number that they havegenerally been ignored by all sides, and the Croats ofthe Burgenland, whose situation is different, notleast because they live along the Hungarian ratherthan the Yugoslav frontier, so that neither they northe Yugoslav regime can be suspected of harboringirredentist ambitions. Disputes and problemsarising from Article 7 and its (non-) application havetherefore usually involved only the CarinthianSlovenes. The fate ofArticle 7, the vicissitudes of theminority since 1955, and the significance of both arethe subject ofPart II ofthis series.

NOTES

1. The importance of the geographic factor is doubly clearwhen one notes what happened at the only two usable "holes"through the arc of high mountains girdling the western end ofCarinthia. Just beyond the low pass between the headwatersof the Drau and the Pustertal (Val Pusteria) in present-daySouth Tyrol, the Slovehes were stopped by a Germanic armyin the only recorded battle associated with their arrival. At

the Tarvis Gap (and over the Karst passes to the south fromCarniola), in contrast, they filtered through, apparentlyunopposed, into eastern Friuli. Here, however, they foundthemselves in a land more densely populated and "civilized"than Carinthia or Carnikola; the result was therefore notanother peaceful ethnic takeover but rather a combination ofgradual assimilation in the plains and surviving colonies in thefoothills and mountains {primarily in the so-called "Slaviaveneta" in eastern Udine Province, the site of last year’sdisastrous earthquakes, in the Soca [Isonzo] valley, andaround Gorizia}.

2. In the interest of accuracy it should be added that therewere two {successive) stone thrones: the Furstenstein, nowin a Klagenfurt museum, and the back-to-back, double-seatedHerzogstuhl, which still stands in place, exposed to the ele-ments, in the middle of the Zollfeld. For details about theceremonies and symbolism surrounding both, see Dr.Valentin Inzko, "Furstenstein und Herzogstuhl--Symbolegemeinsamer Landesgeschichte," in Das gemeinsameKarnten/Sku na Koroska, Nr. 6 (Klagenfurt, 1976, a bilingualpublication of the German-Slovenian Coordination Com-mittee of the Gurk Diocese dedicated to bringing the twoethnic communities together.

3. Figures from Viktor Miltschinsky (a relatively moderatebut sometimes unreliable "grand old man" of CarinthianGerman nationalism when I met and subsequently corre-sponded with him in 1960) in Karnten-ein JahrhundertGrenzlandschicksal (Klagenfurt, Eckartschriften, Heft 2,1950), pp. 16f, and Karnten wehrt sich! {do., Heft 9, 1962), pp.12f. Since the history of the province has generally beenwritten to serve polemical purposes, from one nationaliststandpoint or the other, the summary offered here is neces-sarily a synthesis of many often contradictory sources. Thestandard work in English on the subject in general is ThomasM. Barker, The Slovenes of Carinthia-A National MinorityProblem (New York, 1960), now being revised for a secondedition.

4. For this point, see Ivo Lederer, Yugoslavia at the ParisPeace Conference (New Haven, 1963), pp. 220,223.

5. Wilfried Daim, D/e Problematik der Versohnung derVolksgruppen in Karnten (Klagenfurt, published as Dasgemeinsame Karnten/SkupnaKoroska, Nrs. 4 in German and5 in Slovenian, 1976), p. 20.

6. Cf. Valentin Einspieler, Verhandlungen uber die derslowenischen Minderheit angebotene Kulturautonomie 1925-1930 {Klagenfurt, 1976}. Dr. Einspieler, it should be noted, isboth a Carinthian Slovene school administrator and head ofthe "Verband der Karntner Windischen" {League of Carin-thian Wends, of which more in Part II), and therefore a betenoire for Slovenian nationalists.

7. As will be seen in Part III along with the reasons why eventhe figures given here are only one of several versions.

8. Copy in my files, also quoted in my report on my 1960 in-terviews, "The Slovenes of Carinthia," Institute of CurrentWorld Affairs newsletter, DR-28/30, September 1960.