Charity events, flags and brass bands

The battles for space in the public arena in Styria circa 1900

Abstract

Around the year 1900, Styria was a bilingual province, inhabited by a little under a million German Styrians and 400,000 Slovenes. During the years before WWI, the atmosphere was fraught with conflicts between the two nations. The events of the time were punctuated by heated debates on the allocation of public offices and the equal status of the Slovene language in the administrative offices, courts and schools. Both nations had a tendency to link their unrealised nationalist ambitions with more far-reaching concepts - the German Styrians with the idea of a Greater Germany, and the Slovenes with Pan-Slavism. The loyal government officials, permeated with Hapsburg patriotism, often found themselves in the unenviable position where they were forced, on behalf of the state administration and in the name of loyalty to the Austrian Royal Family, to deal strictly with all exaggerated outbursts of support for such super-state ideas.