Carinthia's nationality struggle has raged more or less unabated since 1848. Until roughly two decades ago there was a relative dearth of secondary materials that one might regard as scholarly in any sense of the word. Polemics—admittedly of some value as a special kind of source material—predominated. Indeed emotional overtones still creep into serious studies. On balance, however, recent work in both Yugoslavia and Austria may be characterized as objective, solid, and methodologically innovative. While articles and books published in the former country are no less significant than those emanating from the latter, only titles that have appeared in German can be reviewed here.

Methodology can be defined as “the principles of organized investigation.” It deals primarily with the question how to arrive at substantive knowledge about the subject under investigation. It is an indispensable tool for scientific work without which the quality of the acquired knowledge would be at the best haphazardous and at worst erroneous.

It is no secret to us history instructors that for some years now there has been a growing sense of uneasiness in our discipline on the part of pupils and students and of helplessness on the part of teachers. Pupils and students repeatedly ask what, after all, is history good for, whether what they are learning is really relevant to their lives, and whether the study of history should not be more than memorizing sterile facts for the purpose of getting grades. Paradoxically, teachers can discern a continuing and in fact ever increasing interest in history. At the same time, we cannot help but notice that the mode of questioning by the younger generation has become different as have the problems that have come with social change.

The question whether a Slovene cultural historian is warranted and justified to speak of a “Slovene Humanism period,” was in Slovene historiography seriously raised in the thirties. Asked in a dispute over a suggestion that a number of scholars, by provenience Inner Austrian Slovenes, who between 1450 and 1525 paved the way for Italian Renaissance Humanism at the University of Vienna, belong to Slovene cultural tradition, the question was answered with the proposition that in the Slovene lands of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an atmosphere of interests and activities existed which indeed might be understood as a “Slovene Humanism.” In the discussion which followed and which is even today far from terminated, the concept “humanism” has been, of course, understood in very loose and broad terms, so that soon even such Protestant Reformers as Primož Trubar (1508-1586) could be proclaimed “Humanist writers.” What I propose to do in this paper is to reexamine this question; in addition, I hope to be able to show that the proposition I wish to develop in relation to a period in Slovene cultural history, may be applicable to the cultural and social history of Slavic nations in general.

Let me open with two caveats. First, given the very brief length dictated for this treatment of Czech and Slovak humanisms, I have chosen to concentrate on their main lines of development and on their primary — i.e., literary — aspect. Second, domestic humanism has received comparatively little attention from Czech and Slovak historians to date. The former have been occupied primarily with the great national-religious revolt, the Hussite Reformation, with which European humanism coalesces when it reaches Bohemia and Moravia. And Slovak historians are still doing basic research into much of their nation's past.

Perhaps no country in Eastern Europe suffered the human, material, and psychological devastation that Poland experienced during nearly six long years of war and occupation. Caught initially between Soviet Communism and German Nazism, and eventually falling completely under the yoke of the latter, the country became the target of ruthless attempts to impose these totalitarian systems on the hapless vanquished population. Without dismissing the sufferings of the ethnic Poles, this paper will focus on the fortunes of the key ethnoreligious minority groups in prewar Poland — the Germans, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews. It will attempt to portray not only the relationship between the occupying powers and the individual minorities, but also the relationships among those population segments in the face of a concerted challenge to their very existence.

The occupation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union in 1940 failed to extinguish feelings of nationalism and patriotism among the native Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian peoples; on the contrary, foreign occupation strengthened their national spirit. Dwelling on the successes and memories of their former independence, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian nationalists continue to denounce the Soviet occupation and resist the policies of communization and Russification practiced by the Soviet regime.