CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Pejic, Oliver |
|---|---|
| Title | Framing National Ambivalence in Interwar Yugoslavia: Lower Styria and Its "Germanophile Slovenes" (1918-1929) |
| Summary | The present thesis examines the discursive articulation and contestation of nationally ambivalent practices in Lower Styria, a formerly Habsburg and majority Slovene-speaking region of interwar Yugoslavia, during the first ten years of Karađorđević rule. By looking at reports from the contemporary Slovene- and German-language press, it researches select aspects of the post-war cultural project of “Slovenization” in order to show how the political transformation of 1918/9 ushered in a new national policy that, much like in interwar Czechoslovakia, made ethnolinguistic nationalism a state-enforced ideology and introduced novel forms of involuntary national categorization. In spite of these innovations, however, Lower Styrian society was also marked by a strong presence of “nationally ambivalent” social, cultural and political practices that contemporary Slovene nationalists framed as “Germanophilia.” The thesis’s individual subchapters examine how the transition to a new “national” government caused a noticeable renegotiation of performed identity among Lower Styria’s officialdom, as well as how new forms of involuntary identity ascription manifested themselves in the interwar Slovene education system and during the 1921 Yugoslav population census. The thesis argues that in spite of its newly gained ascendancy in Lower Styrian society, Slovene ethnolinguistic nationalist discourse was not left unchallenged. The authoritarian aspects of the Slovenization process were fiercely contested in German-language newspapers, and it also found implicit rejection in the diverse nationally ambivalent practices that caused much indignation in the contemporary Slovene-language press. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi, Balázs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/pejic_oliver.pdf |
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