An Unintended Consequence: How the Modern Austrian School System Helped Set Up the Slovene Nation

Abstract

The Austrian school reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by the mindset of the democratic and civic revolutions of 1848, turned a predominantly feudal and religious school system into a modern one and brought basic education to the masses. In the following decades, literacy increased, basic knowledge spread, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church in school matters diminished. Yet, as an “unintended consequence,” these reforms also had great implications for the process of building what turned out to be “the Slovene nation.” This article aims to illustrate that the formation of Slovene national identity—based on the use of the Slovene language as the main marker of Slovene ethnicity—was implemented to a large extent with the help of the Austrian school system and its efforts at centralization, systematization, and modernization. Measures like the creation of a school subject for the Slovene language, Slovene reading materials in school textbooks, and statistical categorization within school administrations played a crucial role in that process.

The Austrian school reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by the mindset of the democratic and civic revolutions of 1848, turned a predominantly feudal and religious school system into a modern one and brought basic education to the masses. In the following decades literacy increased, basic knowledge spread, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church in school matters diminished. Yet, as an “unintended consequence,” these reforms also had great implications for the process of building what turned out to be “the Slovene nation.”

This article aims to illustrate that the formation of Slovene national identity—based on the use of the Slovene language as the main marker of Slovene ethnicity—was implemented to a large extent with the help of the Austrian school system and its efforts at centralization, systematization, and modernization. Thanks to these efforts “from above,” the Slovene language was unified, standardized, and consolidated. While before 1848 there were vernaculars, huge dialectal varieties, different alphabets, a small corpus of the written language, and regionally specific writing traditions, following 1850 the development of a unified “national” language known under one name—Slovene—quickly gathered pace. Measures like the creation of a school subject for the Slovene language, Slovene reading materials in school textbooks, and statistical categorization within the school's administration played a crucial role in that process.

In the following, I discuss these school reforms, that is, the efforts instituted “from above” such as laws, guidelines, and policies, by the new school administration and the Ministry of Religion and Education in Vienna in the aftermath of the revolutionary year 1848. I will focus on how they helped implement a common Slovene language and—as an “unintended consequence”—a collective Slovene national identity. When I call this an “unintended consequence,” I refer to the idea that it was not the main goal of the school reforms and legislation to create national identities; increasing basic education and literacy, modernizing the school system, and standardizing the not-yet-developed languages were. But the “particular spaces” created by them gave place for national identities to develop, as Pieter Judson put it:

The precise concepts of nationhood that developed during the 1880s and 1890s owed a great deal to the particular spaces for them created by the empire. If we examine how existing laws, imperial structures, and political institutions shaped beliefs about nations and cultures, we may gain a clearer understanding of the dynamics that repeatedly reproduced nationalist conflict.¹

I will illustrate how these engagements were implemented throughout different types of schools, textbooks, and statistics. When put in dialogue with ego-documents and newspaper material, it will become apparent how contingent and yet-to-be-established those classifications were at first, but how effectively “Slovenes”—and as their counterparts, “Germans” and others—were produced in the long run. They were effectively being implemented into the minds of so many people, that after 1918, when the new Yugoslav state came into being, the idea of a Slovene national identity could no longer be neglected.

But before turning to the examples mentioned here, and the specifics of the Slovenes within the Austrian school system, it is necessary to situate these findings within extant research in Slovene historiography on nation-building, nationalism, and schools in the late Habsburg monarchy. Following this first section on historiography, the second section will provide a short overview of the Austrian school system's development.

Old and New Approaches in Historiography

Traditional Slovene historiography on nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—as well as mainstream popular culture in Slovenia today—had and sometimes continues to have a primordial understanding of the process of Slovene nation-building. According to this model, in a rather black-and-white dichotomy, the Slovene national movement and its patriotic agents fought for the nation's liberation from the domination of its national “Others,” especially Germans, but regionally also Italians, Magyars, and, later on, Serbs. Whereas Germans were depicted as the masters, this narrative often referred to Slovenes as peasants (kmeti) or servants (hlapci). After a short and glorious period of autonomy in the early medieval realm of Carantania, they fell under the “German yoke,” meaning under German dominance in a “German state,” under which they suffered for a thousand years. The opening of the Slovene national movement, established in the second half of the nineteenth century, is thus referred to as a glorious period of national rebirth or awakening (narodni preporod). The early national movement is portrayed in a very positive light within traditional Slovene historiography in its fight for, first, cultural and linguistic autonomy, and, later, independence. The nineteenth-century movement is thus seen as continuous with the Slovene ethnic community that existed since the times of Carantania. This historiographic narrative of continuity from Carantania to the modern Slovene independent state was most prominently deconstructed in the early twenty-first century by the Slovene medievalist Peter Štih.² In the traditional narrative, the fact that Slovene- and German- (and Italian- and Hungarian-) speaking neighbors in the shared and widely mixed territories of Lower Styria, southern Carinthia, Carniola, the littoral of the Northern Adriatic, and Western Hungary shared the same religion, traditions, folk culture, customs, and political circumstances—and lived together without major friction or feelings of ethnic difference—is widely ignored.³ Later generations of Slovene historians did leave this very schematic narrative of continuity behind but still kept insisting on the pre-existence of a Slovene ethnic community, from which the Slovene national movement ultimately developed. The role of the Habsburg Empire was still seen in a mostly negative light, portrayed as the main adversary of the Slovene nation's development.⁴

By contrast, the modernist approach in historiography on Slovene nation-building—as most prominently represented by Joachim Hösler, Jernej Kosi, and Rok Stergar—offers a rather different and more nuanced picture. The modernist approach confronts the traditional historiography with its blind spots, black-and-white stereotypes, and myths, and instead stresses the common ground and national indifference of linguistically diverse people in this area across the centuries. Most importantly, it exposes traditional national myths for what they are—myths—and highlights that feelings of national belonging and ideas of national unity are rather recent phenomena that only became a strong social force in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵

So where does the Austrian school system of the nineteenth century fit into all of this? The focus of traditional Slovene historiography centered for a long time on the development of Slovene nationalist organizations, politics, and their main agents—basically a thin social layer of the educated male political elite.⁶ Their education was definitively stressed as an important factor. The role of schools, however, especially primary schools, and the literacy of the mainly rural masses was not given much attention. If it came up, the Austrian school system was often depicted as something “foreign,” implemented “from the outside,” coming “from [the nationally German] Vienna,” which did not contribute to the Slovene cause but rather stood in its way, actively hindering or even suppressing the Slovene nation's development.⁷ This focus on a historical narrative that portrays the Slovene national movement as “independent of and opposed to the state”⁸ has caused some blind spots in Slovene historiography, namely how important the Austrian school system was to its development and that (today widely forgotten) Slovene scholars and experts within the education system—by contrast to the traditional black-and-white dichotomy of “the Slovenes” vs. the “German state”—were actively contributing and influencing it.⁹

This article instead postulates that the process of Slovene national identification—which by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was widespread among people in this region—could not have developed so successfully if the state had been really opposed to it and actively hindered it. Therefore, I follow the advice of Pieter Judson “to take the role of empire seriously in the construction of ideas of nationhood,” that is,

Imperial institutions, laws, and administrative practices played crucial roles in giving shape to the more successful forms of nationalism. Distinctive nationalist movements developed in response to and operated very much within the idiosyncratic institutional, legal, and constitutional structures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.¹⁰

This article stresses the favorable influences of the Austrian school system (and therefore the empire) after 1848 on the development of the Slovene language and the development of a Slovene national category of identification. It aims to connect the most relevant research on Slovenes within the Austrian school system¹¹ with the aforementioned modernist approach on Slovene nation-building. The article also presents insights into the civic education of the population through schools and how school authorities tried to strengthen and implement imperial patriotism. Even though, traditionally, research on civic education focused more on supposedly homogenous nation-states and how they cultivated national identity,¹² there are also some excellent studies (most notably by Ernst Bruckmüller and, recently, Scott Moore) on the “nationalizing state”¹³ of the Habsburg Empire, its civic education, and the fostering of loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty through the school system.¹⁴

Research on schools in other areas of the Habsburg monarchy (such as Alexander Maxwell's work on Slovakia and Ágoston Berecz's on Transylvania) suggests that sometimes the outcome of certain school reforms and regulations differed from the intentions of its creators. The outcomes were multifaceted.¹⁵ As the Slovene case will demonstrate, the two outcomes could coexist: by trying to satisfy existing language rights (in the Austrian part of the monarchy) through separate curricula for these languages, and through classifications within the school system, not only was loyalty to the monarchy promoted, but as an unintended consequence, other identification, namely national ones, were simultaneously and inadvertently encouraged and successfully promoted.

The School Reforms of the 1850s and 1860s

Even though the birth of the modern Austrian school system is usually dated back to 1770, when Maria Theresia declared schools a Politikum, or to 1774, when she introduced compulsory school attendance, the system was only seriously modernized after the reforms inspired by the liberal ideas of the revolutions of 1848. In the aftermath of 1848, namely in 1849, the Entwurf der Organisation der Gymnasien und Realschulen in Oesterreich—the “Magna Carta” of Austrian high schools, written by Franz Exner (1802–53) and Hermann Bonitz (1814–88)—was provisionally introduced. In 1854, the minister of education Leo von Thun-Hohenstein (1849–60) made the Organisationsentwurf permanent. The Gymnasien, until then at their core grammar schools for young men of the upper classes, were radically modernized to the form in which they still exist in Austria today: eight years of secondary education (into which new school subjects were introduced—including, notably, the natural sciences and living languages) to be completed with the final exam, the Matura, which allows one to continue their higher education at a university. Even though classical languages and an overall Catholic spirit were still very much alive, they were drastically reduced in comparison to the pre-1848 situation.¹⁶

The era of neoabsolutism (1851–60) put a temporary stop to many developments kicked off in 1848. Weakened by the revolutionary upheavals, Franz Joseph I sought the support of the Church. In the Konkordat treaty of 1855 with the Holy See, he granted the Church—once again—widespread privileges and influence, most notably control over marriage and education. Supervision on all school matters, especially control over primary schools and its teachers, was given back to the Church. Only the supervision of the middle schools, though in theory also controlled by bishops, stayed with the Ministry of Religion and Education. However, the previous reforms of the middle schools that von Thun put into law in 1849 stayed intact and were not reversed, thanks to his ability to find a compromise between progressive education ideas and conservative and religious principles.¹⁷

Whereas middle schools were fundamentally reformed after 1848, elementary schools had to wait until the late 1860s, after the reorganization of the empire with the Ausgleich of 1867 into the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary. In terms of government, administration, and legislation, the two parts of the monarchy went their separate ways and for Cisleithania, the Staatsgrundgesetz of 1867 became the liberal cornerstone, in which control and supervision of the whole education system was declared a state affair.¹⁸ In 1868, a liberal majority in the Reichsrat managed to issue the Schul-Kirche-Gesetz and in 1869, the Reichsvolksschulgesetz. As a result, the Catholic Church lost all supervision over schools, and the educational system finally became a state-led endeavor. Eight years of compulsory school attendance for boys and girls was introduced, and different branches of schools—like the Berufsschulen, Bürgerschulen, Realschulen, and kindergarten—were established or drastically reformed. Moreover, teacher training was professionalized, and Lehrerbildungsanstalten was founded as well: From now on, teachers were public officials, with four years of training, a proper salary, and a pension.¹⁹

In comparison with the pre-1848 situation, the main goal of primary school education changed from providing obedient subjects with moral and religious instructions (“[um] aus den Schulen wohlgesittete, und brauchbare Unterthanen zu erhalten”) ²⁰ to providing them with the knowledge and skills necessary to become capable members of society (“[um] sie mit den zur weiteren Ausbildung erforderlichen Kenntnissen und Fertigkeiten auszustatten und die Grundlage für Heranbildung tüchtiger Menschen und Mitglieder des Allgemeinwohls zu schaffen”).²¹ Many new schools were built, courses were taught by well-trained teachers, and school attendance increased. As a result, literacy rates increased dramatically within just a few decades, as did the average level of education and standard of living.²²

The Ministry of Religion and Education actively supported the development of vernaculars spoken by its citizens into fully developed languages. After the Ausgleich in 1867, especially the Slavic languages in the Austrian half of the monarchy, not only Slovene, but also the Croatian, Ruthenian (Ukrainian), Czech, and Polish languages benefited greatly. The idea was to use these languages to reach citizens and to spread knowledge and the empire's values.²³ Even though Slovene literary studies and popular culture, often guided by nation-based concepts, like to emphasize the contributions of one or another Slovene writer or poet to the development or enrichment of the Slovene language (that shall not be denied), it is also fair to say that the empire and its school system—with its support and stimulation for language development and all its involved agents from different origins—played one if not the crucial role within this process.

The Foundation of It All: A Common, Codified Slovene Literary Language

The Slovene nation was and is still today based on the Slovene literary language, respectively the “national language,”²⁴ as one of its main constituent components, as was and is also the case for many other nations in Central Europe. This is evident when we look at the demands or goals of Slovene national activists. From the very first Slovene political programme, the petition Zedinjena Slovenija sent to the emperor in 1848, Slovene national demands and goals always revolved around language rights: from more language rights and the use of Slovene language in courts and councils, offices, and departments, to the goal of a “Slovene” university in Ljubljana and “more Slovene language in the schools.”²⁵ Therefore, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at Slovene language codification and the role the Austrian school system played in that process.

Before 1848, the Slovene language was not yet a fully developed, supra-regional, standardized, and codified literary language able to fulfil all the necessary functions of a “national” language. A variety of genres of literature had not yet been developed. Different forms of alphabets were in use and competed with each other. There was still no consensus on the name and nature of that Slavic vernacular, nor that it was a language by itself to be clearly differentiated from the neighboring language Illyrian/Croatian. Nor was there a standardized, codified language norm—the first normative spelling, Fran Levec's Slovenski pravopis, was published only in 1899. Dialectal or stylistic differences on how to write Slovene (not to speak of the varieties in oral usage) were huge. Little to no specific terminology for the sciences, law, and other specialized fields existed, and so specialist texts were almost non-existent.²⁶ In terms of Haugen's model on language planning, the four activities associated with language planning—selecting a language norm, codifying it, implementing its functions in society, and elaborating a vocabulary—were not reached yet in 1848.²⁷

In the middle of the nineteenth century, there was not a widespread consensus that all those things would be a desirable goal; it was still widely acknowledged that there were different Slovene/Slavic vernaculars, mainly spoken among people of modest origin and education. The language of writing, higher education, and the higher branches of society was unquestionably German. Anton Šantel (1845–1920), son of modest peasants from today's Austrian-Slovenian border region in Styria, who attended the Gymnasium in Maribor/Marburg and became a respected professor at the Gymnasium in Görz/Gorizia/Gorica, wrote his memoirs around the turn of the century, and described the linguistic situation in his childhood as follows:

Today's generation cannot even imagine the kind of circumstances the Slovene language was in back then. Keep in mind that almost all literature or songs which we have today were written later, and that back then, nine years after 1848, only occasionally did men start to develop a national consciousness. Until then, we grew up in the tradition that even if you speak Slovene, you do not write it. What was written down had to be in German. In elementary schools, Slovene was spoken only to communicate with students, and so they learned to read the catechism and the prayer book. The main purpose of schools was to teach German. People who knew some German kept speaking German. Slovene was spoken only by people who had not had the chance to learn German, so primarily illiterates and those who had forgotten the German they were taught in school. Speaking Slovene was a sign of being uneducated: educated Slovenes used this language only to communicate with uneducated people, e.g., a priest or a teacher speaking with peasants, a student speaking with his peasant parents or other relatives, and among themselves only now and then, and sometimes as a joke.²⁸

Šantel's account illustrates the situation in his linguistically very mixed home region of Lower Styria, where in comparison to Carniola, German was also present in the daily life of rural people. It depicts the different statuses assigned to the two languages: German was the language of the urban upper classes and higher education, the chosen language of the towns and the bourgeoisie, whereas Slovene was thought of as a “peasants' language.” Nationally thinking Slovene intellectuals were painfully aware of the fact that the Slovene language was not yet developed enough to be considered a proper “national language.”²⁹

Nevertheless, within only half a century, and thanks to the efforts of national activists and politicians, newspaper men, editors, writers, and other intellectuals in public life, the Slovene literary language developed quickly and successfully into a fully functional “national” language. What was crucial in helping that process of language development and the spread of linguistic norms—and this is one of the article's main arguments—were guidelines and regulations for schools and textbooks.

Let's start with the question of the alphabet and what is referred to as the Alphabet war (Abecedna vojna) in Slovene historiography.³⁰ The old German-based alphabet, dating back to Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, called the Bohoričica after his inventor Adam Bohorič, was criticized by scholars (e.g., Jernej Kopitar) for being inadequate e.g., to express Slovene sibilants. In the first half of the nineteenth century, new alphabets were invented by Fran Metelko, called the Metelčica, and Peter Dajnko, called the Dajnčica. Both alphabets were based on the Latin letters, but introduced newly invented special characters and borrowed some letters from the Cyrillic alphabet for writing some Slovene sibilants, vowels, and semivowels. Textbooks and textbook translations written in these alphabets were published in the 1820s and early 1830s. Their use of these different alphabets had a regional component: Metelčica was popular mostly in Carniola, and Dajnčica in the eastern parts of Styria. At the same time, Ljudevit Gaj, the main figure of the Illyrian movement, invented his own alphabet for the South Slavic languages, known as Gajica or also called the “tschecho-illyrisches Alphabet,” because it was and is still based on the Latin script and enriched by special Czech characters. In 1846, the first Slovene textbooks were printed in Gajica.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, four (!) different forms of scripts (not to mention the other orthographic varieties and inconsistencies) were to be found in textbooks and other publications of this language. This linguistic chaos was too much for the authorities. In 1833, the Studienhofkommission banned the Metelčica and in 1838, the Dajnčica from use in schoolbooks and official publications. But still, the two other scripts, Bohoričica and Gajica, remained in use, until finally, in 1848, the newly formed Ministry of Religion and Education introduced by decree the “so-called Illyrian orthography,”³¹ to be used in primary schools in Carniola, and in 1849 ordered the k.k. Schulbücherverlag to print Slovene textbooks only in the new Gajica script. As Joachim Hösler puts it, “the ABC dispute was ‘solved administratively’ from outside,”³² that is, “from above.” It was not Slovene intellectuals and writers disputing with each other over these issues in Carniola and Styria (e.g., Matija Čop, France Prešeren, Franc Metelko, Peter Dajnko)—on whom older Slovene historiography and linguistics liked to focus—who reached a consensus on the alphabet most suited for writing in this language, because their opinions differed considerably. In the end, decrees on school matters coming from the Ministry of Religion and Education in Vienna put an end to the dispute.

Another big decision made in Vienna by the new school administration under Leo von Thun-Hohenstein was the question of which “style” should be used to write in schoolbooks. Due to substantial regional varieties, especially between Carniola and Styria/Carinthia, and the separate jurisdiction of each diocese on school and textbook matters before 1848, the grammar, orthography, and morphology used in textbooks differed considerably. Von Thun-Hohenstein decided to standardize this chaos and consulted experts and influential intellectuals on these matters. Among others, he corresponded with the Slovene bishop Anton Martin Slomšek (1800–62) of the Lavant diocese and asked for his opinion on several occasions. Most influentially, he was advised by the important Slovene philologist and Slavicist Fran Miklošič (1813–91), who informed him also about the lack of quality and uniformity in Slovene textbooks.³³ So, on 6 February 1851, von Thun-Hohenstein issued a decree that Slovene textbooks should follow the grammar and orthography found in the Slovene translation of the Official Law Gazette, the Reichsgesetzblätter. Shortly after, on 9 July 1851, in a decree concerning “Slovene language in elementary schools of Carniola,” he ordered that the “language style (Stylisirung)” to be found in the Reichsgesetzblätter should be the “general guideline” (Richtschnur) for Slovene language use in schools and textbooks in general.³⁴

Keep in mind that, by 1848, this “national” language-in-the-making did not yet have one established name. In establishing a single name for all the Slavic/Slovene vernaculars and the different regional writing norms, the Austrian authorities and the school administration played a crucial role. Around the same time, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the first issues of the Reichsgesetzblatt were also translated into eight languages, among them also Slovene.³⁵ In the very first German issue of the Law Gazette, this language was still explained as “Slovene, that is at the same time Windisch and Carniolian” (slovenische (zugleich windische und krainerische Schriftsprache), whereas the first vernacular translation of this first issue was “in the Slovene language” (v slovenskem jeziku).³⁶ The very first translator of the Official Law Gazette into Slovene was Fran Miklošič, and we can assume that he made a very conscious decision to translate by using only one, unified name for the language: Slovene. Because the Law Gazette was the “stylistic guideline” for how to write Slovene textbooks from 1851 onward and because, again, we see Miklošič as the responsible agent/adviser in the background, the name also stuck in school matters. This is noteworthy if we consider that before 1848, each diocese printed its own textbooks in its own language style and alphabet.³⁷ But from this time onward, schools, textbooks, the corresponding school subject, and other forms of categorization used this name and this name only: Slovene. So, the Slovene case illustrates that “the Habsburg linguistic classification from 1849 and its consequent institutionalization had a noticeable influence on the outcome of nation-building.”³⁸

As we have clearly seen, the years 1848–51 were crucial for the codification of the Slovene language. There was one set script and one set name for this language in 1849 and a guideline establishing in which “style” this language was to be written in 1851. All these decisions regarding schools and textbooks were made by minister Thun-Hohenstein, inspired by the mindset of the revolutionary year 1848, and were advised on by important Slovene scholars, first and foremost by Fran Miklošič. Of course, some individuals still may have continued privately to use the other scripts and older orthography or still insisted that they spoke “Carniolian.” But the new codifications had a lot of (institutional) power behind them and were therefore quickly and widely implemented.

Slovene as Teaching Language and School Subject After 1848

A demand very often made by contemporary Slovene nationalists was to “bring more Slovene into the schools,” and respectively to have more “Slovene schools.” But they rarely offered a precise definition of what that really meant and what was demanded in detail.³⁹ Therefore, it is worthwhile discussing, first, Slovene as the teaching language in middle and elementary schools, and second, Slovene as a school subject separately, as I will do in the following.

Slovene as the teaching language in elementary schools existed in prevalently Slovene-speaking areas already well before 1848. In 1848, Exner stipulated that, in elementary schools, there should be teaching only in the mother tongue of the schoolchildren.⁴⁰ Also in upper-level schools, it was common practice that a teacher, if able and willing, would translate ad hoc what has been said in German into Slovene.⁴¹ This was simply a necessity, otherwise, schoolchildren would not have understood their teachers.

In high schools, Slovene as the teaching language was introduced in small steps starting after 1848, and each school decided individually. In the aftermath of the revolution, a common first step was to introduce it in religion and Slovene language classes, later also in “easy subjects” such as history and geography. A large obstacle in this regard, especially in the 1850s and 1860s, was the lack of modern Slovene textbooks, reading materials, and capable Slovene-speaking teachers. The first Gymnasium to make Slovene its sole language of instruction was the Realgymnasium in Kranj/Krainburg in 1870. By contrast, in Styria and Carinthia the upper classes of every Gymnasium were taught in German. In the late nineteenth century, a number of high schools decided on parallel classes taught in Slovene (e.g., in 1895 in Celje/Cilli, which caused the polemic Cillier Schulstreit).

During the seventy-year timeframe between 1848 and 1918, especially after the 1870s, the number of elementary and middle schools with Slovene as the language of instruction grew continually, especially in predominantly Slovene-speaking areas (e.g., in Carniola). But the higher one rose through the educational grades, the more one was taught in German.⁴² The legislative framework for this development was the famous article 19 of the constitution of 1867, which stipulated that all national groups had the right to cultivate their language and were guaranteed the necessary means for elementary education in their language.⁴³ This legislation led to a general trend of linguistic homogenization in the educational system in the late Habsburg monarchy, which has been dubbed by Hannelore Burger as the process of “driving out multilingualism” (die Vertreibung der Mehrsprachigkeit).⁴⁴

Simultaneously, the so called utraquist bilingual elementary school, very popular, especially in Carinthia and Styria in the 1850s and 1860s, was in gradual decline. In these bilingual schools, subjects were taught in two different languages. They were not treated equally though; the second Landessprache (i.e., Slovene in Carinthia and Styria) was used in the lower grades, only until the students knew German sufficiently to be taught in that language. Even though this type of school was popular among Slovene parents because a good command of German promised their children later social mobility and professional advantages, nationalists began to criticize this type of school as a tool for assimilation, namely Germanization.⁴⁵ Over time, elementary schools became increasingly “German” or “Slovene”: for example, in Lower Styria, there were 199 bilingual schools in 1870, but only 49 left in 1912/13.⁴⁶ It is important to stress the fact that, as Pieter Judson has shown, the driving forces behind this development were not state institutions, but rather nationalist associations (such as the Deutsche Schulverein or its Slovene counterpart, the Društvo sv. Cirila in Metoda) and nationalists on the local and regional levels who built private schools and kindergartens, promoted monolingual schools, and used their influence over district school boards to turn bilingual schools into monolingual ones.⁴⁷

Beyond the mere teaching of other subjects in the Slovene language, the school subject of the Slovene language itself, especially in secondary schools, was of great importance to the development of national thinking and the formation of a nationally conscious elite.⁴⁸ With the major reform of the Austrian secondary school system, as stipulated in the Organisationsentwurf in 1849, a new canon of school subjects was introduced in secondary schools. Even though the classical languages Latin and Greek still had considerable hours per week dedicated to them in the Gymnasien (about 6–8 for Latin and 4–6 for Greek), other foreign languages were introduced: German (between 2 and 5 h a week) and—in the areas of mixed Slovene-German speaking population—Slovene language (around 2 h a week).⁴⁹ By 1850, Slovene language as its own subject was introduced in nine Gymnasien in “Laibach, Neustadtl [Novo mesto], Klagenfurt, St. Paul, Graz, Marburg, Cilli, Triest und Görz,”⁵⁰ though not yet as a “full” subject in comparison to the rest. It was obligatory only for Slovene students and became a subject for them at the final Matura exams in 1850, while German students had the optional subject Slovenisch für Deutsche (for whom negative exams in this subject posed no impediment in their advancement).⁵¹

The importance of this new school subject (especially in the upper classes) is to be stressed in three regards. First, Slovenes had to learn the (standard) Slovene language properly, because most of them did not know how to write and read in Slovene yet.⁵² Second, the subject taught the students not only grammar and literature, but simultaneously also a new identification beyond the older regional identities, namely, “that they were not merely Carniolians, Styrians, Carinthians, and Primorci, but first and foremost Slovenes.”⁵³ Third, even though only a small portion of the (male) population attended a middle school, those men later on formed the Slovene intellectual elite that was crucial to and influential for the spread of national thinking and the Slovene national movement.⁵⁴ To illustrate all these effects we can see how a former student of the Gymnasium in Maribor/Marburg, the later lawyer and Slovene nationalist Josip Sernec (1844–1925), described the impact of this subject:

Even though I had told them that I knew Slovene only poorly, they put me into the Slovene class for Slovenes, whereas Germans, who learned Slovene, had their separate hours. My knowledge of Slovene was so insufficient that at the beginning there was almost no word in my written exercises that had not been marked or underlined once, or twice with a red pen, because I did not have any clue about Slovene grammar. But my teacher, Professor Majciger, and after him also his successor, did not grade my bad knowledge, but rather my learning improvement, so that already in the first semester I was given a recht befriedigend [a C], and later never a grade worse than that, so that I remained the model student of my class. In this clever way, my teachers made me like learning Slovene, and also influenced my national thinking.⁵⁵

As the account by Sernec illustrates, the human factor plays a decisive role in school and education in general, and in the formation of a national belief system in particular; as in Sernec's account of his professor Janez Majciger,⁵⁶ many later national thinking men reported on the crucial influence a specific teacher had on them.⁵⁷

When discussing how “national” languages were implemented in the education system of the Austrian Empire after 1848, it is worthwhile to take a closer look, clearly differentiating between the language of instruction spoken during class and the respective language as its own subject of study. For the formation of Slovene national identification, the latter seemed to have had more relevant long-term effects.

Slovene and/or Illyrian?

Even though there was now a subject called “Slovene language” in most of the Gymnasien in the mixed but predominantly Slovene-speaking areas, in the aftermath of 1848 there still were no proper Slovene textbooks available to teach this subject. The Organisationsentwurf advised that, in such a situation without proper teaching materials available, reading materials should be taken temporarily from translations, or from other Slavic languages. In the case of Slovene, the Slavic language most closely related was the Illyrian language,⁵⁸ and so should be consulted. The authors Gundulić, Palmotić, and Georgić, authors from the baroque literary tradition in Dalmatia, are mentioned by name.⁵⁹ From curricula and memoirs, we know that this was indeed common (though provisional) practice in the Maribor/Marburg Gymnasium up to the 1860s,⁶⁰ until this controversial issue was also administratively resolved “from above,” that is, from the school administration in Vienna, and the practice was abolished. In 1864, the Gymnasium in Maribor/Marburg asked the Unterrichtsrat, the supplementary organ set up in place of the Ministry of Education during the years 1860–67, to make the provisional practice of using Gundulić's Osman and Palmotić's Kristijada in Slovene language classes permanent. The request was declined with the explanation that “Illyrian is, in general, of no use to gain deeper insight into the organism of the Slovene language.” Even though the file does not mention his name, we can once again suspect Fran Miklošič as an advisor in the background on this matter, since he was a member of the Unterrichtsrat.⁶¹ This was the end of the provisional use of Illyrian texts for instruction of the Slovene language, and an important step toward fencing off this language from its closest relative. We can only speculate which other directions the language development would have taken—at least in the eastern parts of predominantly Slovene-speaking territories—had this not been the case. Once again, through regulations on schools and textbooks, the development and unification of the Slovene language was influenced to a great extent by language policies set by the school administration in Vienna.

The Implementation of “Sloveneness” in Textbooks

As already argued, Slovene language as a new school subject also implemented the national identification of “Sloveneness,” en passant, into students' minds as a “perspective on the world.”⁶² This becomes obvious if we look closer at the reading materials used in schools, especially at anthology-like readers (Lesebuch, and in Slovene berilo or čitanka), the most common type (and among the lower classes, along with the Rechenbuch and the Katechismus, the only type) of textbooks approved by the Ministry for the use in schools. They provided reading materials of various genres and topics for almost every subject taught over the course of one or two academic years.⁶³ As previous research has shown, national content was only subtly or “subcutaneously” introduced to the students, and editors had to make sure it never contradicted Austrian patriotism and loyalty to the emperor.⁶⁴ So they passed on their own double convictions to their readers by strengthening a feeling of national Slovene identity and at the same time confessing their loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty and the whole empire—a strategy and ideology summed up in one word as Austroslavism.⁶⁵ Specific terms used by textbook editors and writers to explain this “double patriotism” included the “wider homeland (širša domovina)” and the (not specifically explained) “narrower homeland (ožja domovina).” More often than not, as examples from readers clearly show, texts also simply praised “the homeland”—without ever giving a name and without telling the readers what this homeland exactly was—especially when they talked about the ambiguous “narrower homeland,” which could be understood as one's crown land, home region, town, or village. But this could also be the regions inhabited by Slovenes, which is to say the “Slovene lands,” the territory which symbolically houses the collective Slovene national identity.⁶⁶

Let us now look at some examples on a textual level of how Sloveneness was instilled in elementary and middle school readers, when texts were translated into Slovene (mostly from German, sometimes also from Czech and Croatian). By looking at translations and comparing them with the original texts in other languages, we can clearly see interventions, cuts, additions, and changes. In fiction and non-fiction prose, short texts were “localized,” that is framed as Slovene or played in a Slovene setting. This occurred in elementary school readers, for example, where parables and fables told age-appropriate stories which played out in Slovene villages or described events that happened to little Tone, Marijana, or Urša (and not to Carl, Brigitte, or Walburg, as in the German versions).⁶⁷ The harmless world presented in a textbook in this way was a “Slovene world.” Also, non-fiction texts (or translations) in Slovene readers focused (not exclusively, but still frequently) on regional “Slovene” topics, such as local customs and traditions, biographies of important Slovenes, or most commonly the natural beauties of important sites in Slovene-inhabited regions, such as the Postojnska jama, the karst, lakes such as the Wörthersee/Vrbsko jezero or the Blejsko jezero, the Soča/Isonzo river, or mining in Idrija. The same goes for monographic textbooks such as from geography or biology in the higher classes, simply by stating that the natural phenomena or animal discussed is also present in “our lands,” meaning in “the Slovene lands.”⁶⁸ Even in mathematics textbooks, the given examples were localized. Whereas in the German version of the same Rechenbuch, the students had to add together the specific number of kilometres between the stops Gloggnitz–Mürzzuschlag–Graz of the Southern Railway, the textbook example in the Slovene translation asked students to add together the kilometres between the stops “Dunaj [Vienna]–Gradec [Graz]–Celje–Ljubljana.”⁶⁹

Sometimes, the editors of the school readers intervened at the linguistic micro level of individual words to “Slovenize” certain contents, especially in the early textbooks of the 1850s, as the following example from middle school readers will illustrate. We can find examples of the adjectives kranjski (Carniolan) or slovanski (Slavic) being replaced by the adjective slovenski (Slovene). In the famous poem Na moje rojake (To My Compatriots) from 1806, often reprinted by readers in the following decades, Valentin Vodnik had originally addressed his fellow man in the first line: “Krajnz! Toja sémla je sdrava (Carniolian! Your soil is sound . . . ).”⁷⁰ In the first Slovene reader for secondary schools from 1850, the line was still addressed to his fellow Carniolan compatriots (though linguistically modernized).⁷¹ But, from 1865 onward, the compatriot addressed to readers was not Carniolan anymore, but Slovene: “Slovenec! Tvoja zemlja je zdrava (Slovene! Your soil is sound . . . ).”⁷² We can assume that the editor, Anton Janežič (1828–69), of the widely used reader (1865) made this change and the next generation of reader editors followed him in the decision to make the poem fit the new national identity concept.

As has been convincingly shown by Joachim Hösler, the same “editing process” in favor of a common Slovene identity concept on a micro-textual level can also be witnessed in the most important Slovene newspaper of the time, the Kmetijske and rokodelske novice. From 1846/47 onward, its editor Janez Bleiweis (1808–81), started to replace kranjski in received texts with the adjective slovenski and thereby strongly enforced the national dimension of the noun Slovenci, that is, “Slovenes.”⁷³ Where Bleiweis, with his interventions, subtly though effectively pushed public perception toward a Slovene national identity among adults, the editors of school readers did the same among the easily influenced youth. So, what we can see clearly by examining Slovene textbooks of that era is that in a subtle, but effective way, textbooks and readers portrayed a “Slovene perspective on the world,” and thereby shaped and sharpened a specific national worldview.

The Categorization Effect of Middle School Statistics and the Vanishing of National “In-Betweens”

The long-lasting “unintended consequence” of perceiving oneself in terms of a national language-based identity was caused also by statistics and recordings in different situations and for various occasions that put people into mutually exclusive “ethnic boxes.”⁷⁴ Following the international trend toward statistical recording from the 1850s onward,⁷⁵ middle schools throughout the empire kept records of their students. They listed their honor students, students receiving a stipend, their graduates, their teachers, events during the school year, the textbooks and teaching materials used, donations given to the school's library, topics of the Matura exam, and so on. Those numbers and information were published each year in printed annual school reports called Jahresberichte or Programm.

Unsurprisingly, in this statistical overview, the students were also categorized according to language use and, by extension, their nationality. As in the Habsburg census, taken later, the equation “language use = nationality” was inherent in these statistics.⁷⁶ By having its students placed into different categories, individual schools helped to propagate the notion that the students belonged to different national groups and so enforced a groupism that was defined by language use.⁷⁷ In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the column in question in these tables appeared to be quite standardized, with most of them using the category Muttersprache.⁷⁸ Additionally, in later decades, most of the tables also listed a column called “place of birth,” Geburtsort (Vaterland), or sometimes Geburtsland, even though all were citizens of the Habsburg monarchy, which classified the students according to their crown lands of origin.⁷⁹

However, there were a number of ambiguities and terminological imprecisions in these middle school categorizations, especially in the earlier decades of the 1850s and 1860s. Sometimes, middle schools categorized their students not based on different mother tongues, but as “nationalities.”⁸⁰ Some did not have such a column at all,⁸¹ others avoided the question in terminology altogether by not giving the column a name; in such cases, after the total number of students in each year, the statistics continued with “among them are” (darunter sind), and giving the number of Slovenes, Germans, Croats, Italians, and so on.⁸² Comparing a number of annual school reports from different middle schools and different decades, it becomes clear that every school counted and categorized in its own way, though there was, over time, the tendency to name the national proxy classification as “mother tongue” (Muttersprache).⁸³

A very interesting example is given by the k.k. Staatsgymnasium in Maribor/Marburg, where the name of this column in the annual reports from the 1850s and 1860s changed from year to year. In 1854, it spoke of nationality (der Nationalität nach), in 1855 only about language (Sprache), in 1856 and 1857, there was no statistical overview on the students at all. In 1860, this column was not given a name but divided the students into Slovenes and Germans. From 1861 onward, this category was named “mother tongue” (der Muttersprache nach or simply Muttersprache).⁸⁴

Most interestingly, the Staatsgymnasium in Maribor/Marburg did not only give binary possibilities of either Slovene or German, but (in 1854, 1855, and 1861–68) still offered a third, in-between category. In the years 1855, 1861, and 1862, this third possibility was called Utraquisten,⁸⁵ which was defined as follows: “Utraquisten” were students who, “according to their own testimony, grew up in their parents' home learning both the German and the Slovene language equally from an very early age on and have equally good command of both languages.”⁸⁶ After 1863, this possibility in the category “der Muttersprache nach” was called “Deutsch-Slovenisch,” and so the students were respectively “Deutsch-Slovenen.” Those already having national convictions seemed not to have liked this in-between category. Years later, in 1886, in the newspaper Slovan, this third category was harshly criticized by a former student of the school, because it did not fit binary national categories:

Apparently, some powerful men felt that there were too few nations (narodi) in Austria, so they invented one more nationality (narodnost): halflings (polovičarji), in the annual reports of the Gymnasium Maribor the so called “utraquisti,” those who knew Slovene and German equally well.⁸⁷

The interesting Slovene term polovičar (from polovica “half”) pejoratively used here translates to “halfling” and refers to someone who does or is something only in half. The critique of this in-between category fits the general criticism of bilingualism and bilingual education from national associations and sizable parts of the pedagogical mainstream of the time (as has been already illustrated by Tara Zahra with examples from Bohemia and Moravia, and Pieter Judson for the Slovene-German “language frontier” in Styria). From the perspective of nationalist activists, bilingual education would breed social outcasts with low self-esteem, individuals who could not keep up with their peers, “linguistically neutral hermaphrodites,”⁸⁸ or even violent renegades. In Styria, the concern was mainly for “children from mixed marriages or children of nationally hermaphrodite parents” that would become “lost” to their nation.⁸⁹

However, in later decades, this third in-between possibility was no longer given in the statistics of the Staatsgymnasium in Maribor/Marburg and the “halflings”—the utraquisti—vanished.⁹⁰ This correlates with the fact that people, also on other occasions and in other regards, were increasingly forced to take sides and to decide on one—and only one—ethnolinguistic group identity for themselves (naturally, at the expense of other options)—a choice, they may not have wanted, been able to make, or understood.⁹¹ Nevertheless, in reality, these in-between identifications did not vanish, and feelings of “national flexibility” or “national indifference” still existed.⁹² Choices were made rather opportunistically, pragmatically, and based on economic, financial, and other considerations. Nationality issues were not always key for making specific decisions in life.⁹³ Or as Rok Stergar and Tamara Scheer have put it, “identification with a nation did not follow an algorithmic logic” and “nation-ness remained contingent and situational.”⁹⁴

In sum, these school statistics were an early attempt by the empire to not only categorize its population along national lines, but by doing so also effacing the nationally indifferent.⁹⁵ Moreover, the trend toward the category “mother tongue” reflects the developments and discourse in European and Austrian statistics of that time, visible in the fact that from 1880 onward, the Austrian censuses asked for people's Umgangssprache, or language of everyday use. It popularized the idea that one's nationality can be easily measured or pinned down by one's language use.⁹⁶ As Stergar and Scheer have pointed out, such categorizations were powerful and, in the long run, produced group identities. “The boxes used in bureaucratic forms and questionnaires [and we might want to add: in school statistics] by the modernizing state throughout the nineteenth century turned into ethnic boxes.”⁹⁷ As they continue:

by classifying its inhabitants in ethnolinguistic categories, in schools, the army, during the census, and on other occasions, the Habsburg state helped popularize the idea that everyone could be ascribed to a single, objectively determined, and internally homogenous national group. In other words, that everyone had an ethnic box they fit in.⁹⁸

However arbitrarily those categorizations were first “made up,” they effectively produced “Slovenes” and “Germans” (and after 1945 “Austrians”) in the long run. Perhaps this is most strikingly documented in the following recollection. A former student of the Staatsgymnasium in Maribor/Marburg, Anton Šantel, who we have heard from earlier, recalled in his memoirs the process of data collection for these statistics:

One day [in 1861], Principal Lang came to our class with a bunch of papers and asked every one of us in alphabetical order for his mother tongue. . . . When it was my turn, I stuttered that I had equally good command of German and Slovene. [Pavel] Turner, who sat next to me, punched me under the bench and whispered: “You are a Slovene! You are a Slovene!” At the same time, Principal Lang asked me: “In which language did you first say your prayers?” . . . So I answered: “Slovene” . . . and that's what he wrote down.”⁹⁹

Conclusion

As Pieter Troch has convincingly shown for interwar Yugoslavia and its elementary schools, by then the Slovene national identity and the Slovene language were already well established and were factors that could no longer be ignored or negotiated away. Even though there were voices that demanded the reduction of Slovene to a mere dialect of Serbo-Croatian, or to create a new common linguistic unity out of both languages into one “uniform Yugoslav written language,” those suggestions were unsuccessful, and “Slovenian was recognized as a separate language.”¹⁰⁰ Moreover, he shows how elements from Slovene culture and history were used and reinterpreted in curricula and textbooks (though clearly in a smaller number than Serbian and Croatian ones) to create an overarching Yugoslav cultural identity.¹⁰¹ This shows convincingly that in the decades prior to 1918, a unified Slovene language and a largely known and accepted Slovene national identity had successfully been built in most Slovene-speaking areas, where schools with Slovene as a subject and as a teaching language alongside Slovene textbooks existed prior to 1918. Of course, there were limits. The findings by Jernej Kosi on the region of Prekmurje prove this argument to be true ex negative; in Prekmurje, which belonged to the Hungarian part of the empire prior to 1918, such schools did not exist, and in 1918 a feeling of belonging to the Slovene nation was not yet extant.¹⁰² The case of Carinthia also attests to these conclusions: where there was only a small number of such schools, the mobilization effects toward a Slovene group identity were limited (and were rather steered toward a German national identity).¹⁰³ It is fair to conclude that the Austrian school system between 1848 and 1918 was very influential in setting these favorable social and educational circumstances and fuelled the mobilization toward a Slovene national group identity.

As was made clear, the Austrian school administration's modernization efforts after 1848 were impressive and long-lasting. They brought basic education to the masses, increased literacy, over time diminished the overwhelming influence of the Catholic Church and turned an essentially feudal society into a modern one. So without a doubt spreading literacy and basic education among the masses can be identified, as Jürgen Osterhammel put it, as one of the “most important cultural transformation processes of the nineteenth century,” which contributed to what he termed “the Transformation of the World.”¹⁰⁴ The development of not-yet-fully standardized languages of the empire, such as Slovene, was crucial for achieving this transformation, because only in this way could the common people who spoke these languages be reached effectively. Thus, a lot of effort was made to standardize, modernize, enable, and enrich the Slovene language. This largely came “from above,” through the specific regulations set by the school administration—a fact that has not yet been appreciated and stressed enough in existing historiography. However, the Austrian school system—and here I want to contradict traditional Slovene historiography—was not something “foreign” or “German,” implemented by Vienna against the will and without the collaboration of Slovene scholars and education experts to obstruct Slovene linguistic and national development. On the contrary, Slovene experts within the school system¹⁰⁵ were active agents and co-decision makers who significantly influenced the content of Slovene-language textbooks, educational policy, and linguistic standardization processes; they acted by advising ministers of education on school legislation, writing, translating, editing, and creatively “Slovenizing” textbooks, deciding on the approbation of such textbooks as anonymous peer-reviewers, categorizing students based on national categories, and, last but not least, by teaching the Slovene language and thereby also instilling the Slovene national concept into children's minds.

In conclusion, the mid-nineteenth-century school reforms, with regulations to strengthen and consolidate the Slovene language, had effects way beyond their primary scope. As an “unintended consequence,” the Slovene national group identity was enforced and empowered considerably. As this article has demonstrated, the Slovene language as its own subject of study, the creation of Slovene reading materials for other subjects, and that material's translation and “Slovenization” for textbooks and statistical categorization within the school's administration, played a crucial role in the process of turning “Slovene” into one of the possible ethnolinguistic boxes tracked by the Austrian Empire and into a vivid and long-lasting identity concept for many people.