Struggle for a School at Trava. On National Differentiation on the Outskirts of the Gottschee Region in the Final Decades of the 19th Century

Abstract

With the spread of the national idea in the final decades of the 19th century, the process of national differentiation began in the bilingual villages on the outskirts of the Gottschee region. The bilingual rural population, who spoke Gottscheerish at home and prayed in Carniolan or Slovene, was driven by the actions of nationalist activists and the demands of the civil administration to identify as Germans or Slovenes. In the paper at hand, the author examines the described process through a microstudy focusing on the impact of the school problem in the rural municipality of Trava.