**1. Introduction**

Indigenous or native Gottscheers, also referred to as Gottscheers or Gottscheer Germans, were one of the eldest German ethnic or national1 communities outside

<sup>1</sup> While we are aware that the terms "ethnic" and "national" bear different meanings on an analytical level (nation being a politically conscious ethnic group), we use them as synonyms for the purposes of this text. This "arbitrary" use of concepts stems from the names of particular societies, associations, and communities (e.g. the *Association of Cultural Societies of the German Speaking Ethnic Communities*) and a similar lack of coherence in scientific terminology. The German community in Slovenia in particular is defined through various names. Scientific literature proposes the German-speaking national community or the German national community as the most appropriate terms ([1], Komac in Polzer et al. 2002, [2, 3]).

of German and Austrian territory and the only agrarian German linguistic island on Slovenian territory after WWI. However, these settlements and their cultural landscape and heritage had been wiped out almost entirely due to the Gottscheers' emigration/eviction (mainly to the USA and Canada), WWII, and post-war decay, depopulation, marginalization, as well as village and cultural monument destruction and slovenianization. While there is a significant amount of literature available on the topic of the Gottscheer region and its indigenous inhabitants, studies on its contemporary dwellers are relatively scarce. This chapter provides a case study of this indigenous community from the point of view of those individuals, ever fewer today, who belong to this community and are (or were) active in particular Gottscheer societies or engage in Gottscheer-related topics as amateurs and descendants of Gottscheer parents, or whose one or both parents are Gottscheer, and identify themselves as such, but do not necessarily have any connections to the Gottscheer community or any particular interest in the topic.<sup>2</sup> The purpose is to identify how indigenous Gottscheers or their descendants perceive Gottscheer identity on an individual and social level, how (if at all) they identify with it, what is the significance of cultural heritage and the Gottscheer dialect, what mechanisms should preserve them, and finally how Gottscheers and their identity should be incorporated in the Slovenian (and broader) cultural space and collective memory.

Methodologically, the study is mostly based on semi-structured interviews with people whose life stories are directly or indirectly related to the Gottscheer community. The data collection was carried out in two ways: the main representatives of two Gottscheer societies and one institute were interviewed, while the rest of the interlocutors were obtained mostly by the snowball method. Two out of eleven interviewees3 are not of Gottscheer origin: one is a precious information source about this community, having grown up in a Gottscheer village, having studied Gottscheer issues, and being familiar with the dialect; the second one is a Styrian German and a member of the *Association of Cultural Societies of the German Speaking Ethnic Communities in Slovenia*, which includes the indigenous Gottscheer society, and, as an umbrella organization, aspires to acquire legal minority status for the German-speaking community in Slovenia (including Gottscheers). The interviews were conducted in various places in the Kočevska region, in Ljubljana, and Maribor and lasted from 30 to 90 minutes. The methodological starting point that framed the choice of interviews was that identity issues and cultural needs of indigenous Gottscheers primarily manifest themselves through the existence of cultural societies of the community. However, fieldwork in which two societies and one institute are studied revealed a discrepancy between the two leading cultural societies as a major backlash. The two societies differed in the ways they were run, in the priorities of their programs, in the amount of funding they received in Slovenia and abroad, as well as in terms of Gottscheer identity and dialect ("German" vs. "Slovenian"), which was the reason many representative members of the society declined participation in this study, either because they were no longer active members or because they were in the process of exiting and/or transferring to another society.

<sup>2</sup> The case study was executed in 2012 by the *Center for Cultural and Religious Studies* at the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Ljubljana) with the author of this chapter as the principal researcher and commissioned by the *Cultural Diversity and Human Rights Service of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports of the Republic of Slovenia*.

<sup>3</sup> Due to anonymization, all interviewees in the chapter are listed in the feminine grammatical form.

*Disappearing Community and Preserved Identity: Indigenous Gottscheers in Slovenia DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110382*
