Chapters authored
Disappearing Community and Preserved Identity: Indigenous Gottscheers in Slovenia
The chapter is a case study of the indigenous Gottscheers in contemporary Slovenia. They were one of the eldest German ethnic communities outside of German and Austrian territory and the only agrarian German linguistic island on Slovenian territory after the WW1. However, their settlements and cultural landscape and heritage had been wiped out almost entirely due to the Gottscheers’ wartime and postwar emigration/eviction (mainly to the USA and Canada), the WW2, and post-war decay, marginalization, depopulation as well as village and cultural monument destruction and Slovenianization. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s languages in Danger, the Gottscheer language is defined as “critically endangered”. The number of today’s Gottscheers in Slovenia is small, less than 300, or around 1000 including descendants and sympathizers. However, on the other hand, contemporary Association of Cultural Societies of the German Speaking Ethnic Communities in Slovenia as an umbrella organi¬zation of predominantly Styrian Germans aspires to acquire legal minority status for the German-speaking community in Slovenia (including Gottscheers). The aim of the chapter is therefore to detect contemporary perceptions of a marginalized and disappearing Gottscheers’ community and mechanisms to preserve and finally incorporate its identity into the Slovenian (and broader) cultural space and collective memory.
Part of the book: Minorities