Gottschee

slow. Kočevje

Gottsche German: Göttscheab, `s Gotscheab, Kotscheab

The origin of the term is unclear. It is thought to derive from the Slovenian collective noun ‘Kočevje’, meaning ‘a cluster of huts’ (Slovene: Koča = ‘hut’).

The settlement area, covering just over 800 km², was situated in the south of present-day Slovenia, in the historic Crown Land of Carniola within the Habsburg Monarchy, amidst a high-altitude forest, including the Hornwald, after which the entire region is sometimes named.

Three mountain ranges running parallel to one another stretch across the region from north-west to south-east, giving rise to four trough-shaped valleys. The hard-to-access high forest (up to 1,200 m) stands on a bedrock of water-permeable, soluble Triassic and Jurassic limestones (semi-karst).

Until the end of the 13th century, the Hochwald had not been developed and served as the natural southern border of the Habsburg Monarchy.

In 1247, the Counts of Ortenburg, a noble family from Carinthia, received territories in the south of Carniola – in what was known as Lower Carniola – as fiefs from the Patriarch of Aquileia. These included the previously undeveloped high forest, which formed the natural border with Croatia. The Ortenburgs first recruited farmers and craftsmen from the surrounding area, and subsequently from Carinthia, East Tyrol, Franconia and Thuringia, to develop the primeval forest. Place names such as Windischdorf/Slovenska vas or Deutschdorf/Nemška vas, as well as the name of the region itself, indicate that the settlement was established from the outset by Slovenian- and German-speaking colonists. As early as 1377, the village of Gottschee was granted market rights, and in 1471 it was granted town rights. At the beginning of the 15th century, Frederick III of Ortenburg granted the farmers of the Gottschee region the right to use the forest for their own purposes. Shortly afterwards, following the extinction of the Ortenburg line, Gottschee passed to the Princes of Cilli. When the rising Habsburgs took over all the territories of the Princes of Cilli in the mid-15th century as a result of an inheritance agreement, Gottschee also came under Habsburg rule and remained so until the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918.

With the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the founding of the first Yugoslav state in 1918 (the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), all Gottscheer became Yugoslav citizens and the Gottscheer Germans became a national minority. As a process of nation-building began in the Slovenian part of the kingdom, the Gottscheer Germans were inevitably subjected to pressure to adopt Slovenian culture. In 1920, they were denied the right to vote; however, from 1925 onwards, they were once again permitted to take part in all elections.

The most important political organisation of the Gottscheer Germans was the ‘Gottscheer Farmers’ Party’, founded in 1921 under the leadership of the Catholic priest Josef Eppich (1874–1942). The Farmers’ Party fought in vain against the new language and education policies: the presence of just one native Slovenian speaker in a municipality was sufficient to declare Slovenian the official language. German lessons in state schools were significantly reduced. Against this backdrop, the ‘ethnic identity’ ideology gaining ground in Germany – which classified the Gottscheer Germans as‘Germans abroad’threatened by ‘assimilation’ and ‘foreign infiltration’ – fell on fertile ground. In early August 1930, Pastor Eppich and the lawyer Dr Hans Arko (1888–1953) organised a 600th-anniversary celebration of the‘German linguistic enclave’. Members of a younger generation of ethnic nationalists went beyond the rather regionally patriotic and conservative intentions of Arko and Eppich, and in the years that followed they assumed political leadership of the Gottschede Germans. In early 1933, they welcomed Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and, in March 1938, celebrated the so-called ‘Anschluss’ of Austria to Germany. Wilhelm Lampeter (1916–2003), born near Gottschee in 1916, returned from Berlin to Gottschee in 1939, where he became head of the ‘Volksdeutsche Mannschaft’ within the so-called Kulturbund. He reorganised this body along the lines of the NSDAP.

In Gottschee itself, 94 Germans were still counted in 1948. Emigration at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and the resettlement of the Gottschee Germans in 1941–42, had left the region deserted. During the war, Slovenian partisans used the forest as a hideout and to set up some of their most important hideaways. Towards the end of the war, partisans killed thousands of actual or suspected Slovenian, Croatian or Serbian collaborators. Their bodies remained in the ravines of the Hornwald, which became synonymous with the ‘Day of Wrath’, the mass murders of 1945–46.

In the 1950s, the Slovenian government systematically ordered the destruction of all remaining churches, chapels and almost all wayside shrines in the former settlement area of the Gottschee Germans. Even during the war, the Gottschee region – and the Hornwald in particular – had been among the areas hardest hit. As part of its offensive in the summer of 1942, the Italian army systematically destroyed around a hundred villages to prevent them from providing shelter to the partisans. In total, 112 of the approximately 170 to 180 settlements in the Gottschee were destroyed during and after the war. From 1950 to 1990, an area of around 200 km² in the Gottschee was a restricted military zone. As a result of these factors, according to Mitja Ferenc, the forest reclaimed around three hundred square kilometres of the Gottschee and now once again covers more than 90 per cent of the former settlement area. According to Ferenc, hardly any other cultural landscape in Europe has undergone such changes as the Gottschee. It all began, and it all ended, with the forest.

The 1880 census recorded a total of 26,000 inhabitants in the Gottschee region, of whom just under 19,000 were German-speaking or German (in 1880, statisticians recorded ‘everyday language’ for the first time and interpreted this as an expression of ‘nationality’). From the early 1880s onwards, the pressure to emigrate increased: Too many young people could no longer find work that provided a living in agriculture, the timber industry, piecework or itinerant trade. For economic reasons, and later also because of the war, entire families emigrated, predominantly to the United States of America. By 1925, up to 25,000 Gottscheers are said to have emigrated to the USA. Cleveland was home to the largest Gottscheer settlement. In the ‘Ländchen’, one in every three houses stood empty.

According to the 1921 census, 40,394 people lived in the Kočevje district, including 9,892 Germans (based on mother tongue). This share of the population, at 24.5 per cent, fell only marginally over the following ten years: in 1931, a total of 37,954 inhabitants were counted, including 8,819 Germans (23.2 per cent).^[4]

As a result of the pedlar’s licence of 1492, a distinctive form of itinerant trade developed, which persisted for centuries and popularised the typical image of the pedlar with a towering pack on his back. The traders were not permitted to exchange goods for money in the usual way. Instead, they resorted to various small games of chance, through which they sold their wares and realised their earnings. On average, around seven per cent of men are thought to have set out on their travels with their wares; they usually returned home at Christmas, only to set off again in January with a fresh load. The men’s return home was celebrated at Easter or at the summer solstice. The travelling traders made their way through Carniola, to the coastal regions, through Styria, to Carinthia and Tyrol; they travelled as far as Salzburg, Vienna, Prague and into Polish- and Russian-speaking areas. Unfortunately, no research has been carried out into how this source of additional income – which was probably unique in Europe – affected, on the one hand, the travelling men, who had to be strong and articulate, and, on the other, the women left at home, who had to manage the household and farm, the children and the livestock without their husbands. Nor do we know whether this unique economic phenomenon in Europe tended to hinder or promote socio-economic development in the Gottschee region. What role did the traders’ earnings play, and how significant was the knowledge transfer? It is said in the online community that it was the itinerant traders – known here as ‘Hausierer’ – who brought the first qualified teachers to the ‘Ländchen’.^[5]

For centuries, the Gottschee remained a region of smallholders, where agriculture and forestry formed the basis of a meagre existence. The colonists’ main task was to extract the raw material – timber – from the forest. The forest also played a defining role in that it stabilised the climate and protected the land from drying out and the loss of humus. Dwellings and household items were made from wood. The colonists hunted for meat and furs from the forest’s wildlife: dormice, martens, lynx, wolves, foxes, wild boars and bears. It was not until 1844 that a steam-powered sawmill began operating in the town of Gottschee. The 1860s and 1870s are regarded as a period of economic prosperity. On 27 September 1893, the railway line between Ljubljana and Gottschee was opened ‘amidst a jubilant atmosphere’^[6] . It was only as a result of these measures that rational forest management began.

The historic Gottschee is a thing of the past. On 8 July 1990, tens of thousands of people gathered for a reconciliation ceremony at the mass graves in Hornwald. In 1992, the ‘Gottscheer Altsiedler Verein’ was founded in Slovenia, which campaigns for the preservation of the culture and language, as well as for the official recognition of Germans as a national minority. In order to distance itself from demands for the restitution of property belonging to the Gottscheers who were resettled in 1941–42, the association withdrew in September 2006 from the ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Gottscheer Landsmannschaften’ (Working Group of Gottscheer Regional Associations), a loose association of regional organisations. Similarly, the ‘Gottscheer Peter Kosler Verein’, which has existed in Slovenia since 1994 and also aims to preserve the culture and language of the Gottschee region, declared its withdrawal from the Working Group in 2005, citing what it regarded as the group’s backward-looking, aggressive policies that strained relations with the Slovenian population.^[7] In addition, there are three smaller associations focused on specific sub-regions dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage. With financial support from Slovenia and abroad, particularly from heritage associations based in the USA, small museums, memorial sites and information boards have been established, and cemeteries and chapels have been renovated and restored. Cooperation in this area is occasionally disrupted by controversies between the associations or individual representatives, as indicated above. For example, unlike all other organisations, the Altsiedlerverein rejects language tuition in the Gottschede German dialect.

Memories of life in the ‘Ländchen’ are kept alive in printed publications and, for some years now, on the internet, where a ‘virtual village square’ (Karl-Markus Gauß) has emerged. Particularly active in this regard are individuals and associations in Graz and Klagenfurt who identify with the Working Group of Gottscheer Regional Associations. A typical example of this kind of self-representation is the magazine *Gottscheer Gedenkstätte*, which is published ‘as and when required’ by the association of the same name in Graz-Mariatrost. For the most part, this constitutes an idealised culture of remembrance that seeks to know little of the rise of nationalism at the end of the 19th century, the political shift to the right in the late 1920s, the disastrous influence of NSDAP and SS loyalists, and the fact that Gottscheer Germans became both deceived victims and perpetrators in the wake of the fascist policy of extermination. Critical reflection now predominates in current literature.

• Mitja Ferenc, Joachim Hösler (eds.): In Search of Traces in the Gottschee. German-speaking Settlers in Slovenia. Potsdam 2011 (Potsdam Library: Eastern Europe – History).
• Karl-Markus Gauß: The Forest of History – In the Gottschee. In: Ibid.: The Dying Europeans. A Journey to the Sephardim of Sarajevo, the Gottschee Germans, the Arbëreshë, the Sorbs and the Aromanians, Munich 2002, pp. 51–95.
• Jakob Grollitsch (ed.): A Selection of Europe. Gottschee, Klagenfurt 2015.
• Hugo Grothe: The German Language Enclave of Gottschee in Slovenia. A Contribution to the Study of German Culture in South-Eastern Europe, Münster 1931.
• Adolf Hauffen: The German-speaking enclave of Gottschee. History, dialect, living conditions, customs and traditions, legends, fairy tales and songs, Graz 1895.
• Dušan Nećak (ed.): The ‘Germans’ in Slovenia (1918–1955). A Brief Overview. Ljubljana 1998.
• Thomas Nußbaumer: Alfred Quellmalz and his South Tyrolean Field Research (1940–42). A Study of Folk Music under National Socialism. Innsbruck, Vienna, Munich 2001.
• Martin Pollack: The Dead Man in the Bunker. Vienna 2004.
• Helmut Rumpler, Arnold Suppan (eds.): History of the Germans in the Territory of Present-Day Slovenia 1848–1941, Vienna etc. 1988.
• Michael Wedekind: Cultural Commission of the SS ‘Ahnenerbe’. In: Handbook of Ethnic Sciences. Edited by Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar and Alexander Pinwinkler. With the collaboration of David Hamann. 2nd, substantially expanded and revised edition. 2 vols. Vol. 2: Research Concepts – Institutions – Organisations – Journals. Berlin, Boston 2017, pp. 1866–1879.
• Richard Wolfram: Customs and Folk Beliefs in the Gottschee, Vienna 1980.

• Josef Perz, Fritz Högler, Heinrich Schemitsch: The School System in the Gottschee Region. In: www.gottscheer-gedenkstaette.at/gottschee_kultur1.htm (accessed 2 February 2018)
• gottschee.at/ (Website of the working groups of the Gottschee regional associations; rather uncritical and idealised)
• www.gottschee.de (Private website by Josef Gladitsch, Munich, which demonstrates a clear endeavour to critically reflect on history whilst taking into account findings from historical scholarship)
• www.gottscheerland.at (Website of the Gottscheer Gedenkstätte Association, Graz-Mariatrost; extensive text and image material, similar in content to the working group’s site)
• www.sprachinselverein.at (Website of the Association of Friends of the Linguistic Enclaves Settled from Austria in the Middle Ages, Vienna)

[1] Hauffen: *The German Sprachinsel*, p. 31.

[2] Wolfram: Customs and Popular Beliefs, p. 11. On the role of SS-Untersturmführer Richard Wolfram in ‘Southeast Research’ and as a member of the SS ‘Ahnenerbe’ in South Tyrol, see Nußbaumer: Alfred Quellmalz; Wedekind: ‘The Cultural Commission of the SS “Ahnenerbe”’.

[3] Grothe: The German Language Enclave of Gottschee in Slovenia, p. 179.

[4] Rumpler, Suppan, History of the Germans; Nećak (ed.): The ‘Germans’ in Slovenia.

[5] Perz, Högler, Schemitsch: The School System.

[6] Hauffen: The German Language Enclave, p. VII.

[7] The letters of resignation can be found at: www.gottschee.net/forum/messages/233.html and www.gottschee.net/forum/messages/234.html (accessed 22 February 2018). On the working group’s website, however, the Peter Kosler Association is still listed as a member: wwwu.aau.at/hleustik/gottschee/ag/mitglied.htm (accessed 22 February 2018).