« L’ossuaire des Slaves » ?
Abstract
Quite a large part of the territory of present-day Germany (to the Elbe river in the West and to Franconia in the South) was populated by Slavs in the 10th/11th century. Due to German political domination, German nobility and internal colonisation almost the whole area succumbed to Germanisation by the 20th century and thus became an “ossuary of the Slavs” (J. Kollár). But the Slavs left traces in this Slavia submersa: toponyms, traditions, customs. And the Slavia submersa was (and still is) quite alive in the collective memory of the Slavs, above all in the context of the conflict between Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism.Moreover there is a Slav “island” (or rather an archipelago) in this German “sea”: the Sorbs in Saxonia and in Brandenburg. This Slavia, even though equally subjected to the pressure of Germanisation, survived an assimilation that was sometimes “organic”, sometimes carried out by the use of force (by state and/or church authorities). In order to maintain its identity it is still battling the assimilatory force of a world becoming more and more mobile, globalised and “mediatised”. The defence concentrates on the maintenance of language (Upper and Lower Sorbian), but it is also a territorial battle. The territory is mainly linguistic, defined by the presence of speakers of the language, by toponyms, inscriptions etc., but it is also a most real territory: strip mining in Lusatia encroaches upon the regions where Sorbs live and often engenders the “devastation” of Sorbian villages and the transfer of the Sorbian-speaking inhabitants to German-speaking regions which almost inevitably leads to accelerated linguistic assimilation. For the defence of their territory the Sorbs try to invoke constitutional and legal guarantees given to them as a minority, but often these guarantees are not interpreted in their favour in legal disputes. In view of the numerous unfavourable factors working against the Sorbs (modernisation, globalisation, increasing mobility etc.) their future (and especially that of the Lower Sorbs) looks bleak, but the battle is still going on.
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