Slavs in Post-Nazi Austria: Carinthian Slovenes and the Politics of Assimilation, 1945–1960 by Robert Knight (review)

Robert Knight’s investigation into “the rise, decline and fall” of an officially multilingual and multicultural Carinthia (6) opens and closes with a reflection on the legacy of Urban Jarnik, a Carinthian Slovene Romantic who in 1826 published a plea for respectful coexistence of Austrians and Slovenes in his home state. Against this backdrop, Slavs in Post-Nazi Austria adopts an elegiac tone as the author traces the at times aggressive push for the assimilation of the Slovene minority. The book highlights two pivotal factors that informed this debate not only in the late 1940s and in the 1950s—the focus of this study—but also in the preceding decades: Policy regarding the presence of Slovene in public schools and the Windisch population of Carinthia (Carinthians with a Slovene background who, however, over generations had adopted to the culture and language of the German-speaking majority). Knight intends to rectify the notion that assimilation was inevitable for and, in fact, desired by Carinthian Slovenes. Knight is unhappy that this idea was not only disingenuously spread at the time by pro-assimilation politicians and also that subsequent generations of scholars uncritically adopted and thus corroborated this reading of history (119).

Slavs in Post-Nazi Austria first discusses the prelude for the crisis of Slovene identity in Carinthia after 1945. An exploration of the proliferation of nationalist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is followed by a discussion of Slovene Carinthian attitudes toward the First Austrian Republic and the Anschluss of 1938. The Abwehrkampf of 1919, the foundational event in modern Carinthian mythology, receives detailed attention for its effects on the state’s identity politics. Knight subsequently analyzes the reasons for the Slovene minority, and above all the “Windisch” population, to mostly vote for Carinthia to remain Austrian in 1920 and for Austria to unite with Hitler’s Germany in 1938. After 1939, these circumstances provided National Socialist leaders with a powerful pretext to eliminate Slovene identity in Carinthia, seeing as how the affected population had supposedly acknowledged the superiority of Austria’s germanophone culture.

A key step towards rapprochement between Germans and Slovenes following Nazi rule was to be the introduction of compulsory bilingual education for all Carinthian pupils (35). Previously, so-called utraquistic schools had accommodated Slovene but as a “transitional medium until German alone could be used as the sole language of instruction” (4). The Slovene minority warmly welcomed the innovation as a first step toward reconciliation. Critics, however, argued that bilingual schools were “the start of the slippery slope to secession” and favored the return to the utraquistic model (50).

As Carinthia became a bargaining chip in Cold War politics, minority rights in the mind of the Allies took a back seat to fortifying an Austrian bulwark against Stalinism and Titoism (71). This allowed for the rehabilitation of former national socialists as well as gradually increasing attacks on bilingual schools (72). The proponents of the latter disingenuously argued that parents should allow to choose the language of instruction, knowing full well that most would opt for germanophone classes to maximize their children’s cultural capital and to avoid being ostracized (76).

The pressure to assimilate increased in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, especially in the wake of Carinthia’s 1951 census, which was designed and interpreted to minimize the presence of citizens with a Slovene background, for instance by inflating the categories of “Windisch” speakers (88). The return of Austrian sovereignty in 1955 further emboldened nationalist groups to push back aggressively against Article 7 of the constitution providing protection for the Slovene minority (97). By 1957, “anti-Slovene assumptions had [ . . . ] entered the Austrian mainstream and were presented as self-evident truth” (108). The notion of a second Abwehrkampf in 1958 indeed led to the abolition of compulsory bilingual education and to a “massive assimilatory shift” that would determine the fate of Slovene...