In the place names of Slavic or Slovene origin in Upper (and Lower) Carinthia and Eastern Tyrol many sound forms are to be found which are corresponding to those in the Freising Manuscripts, partly in early documents, partly in the contemporary forms also. The language of the Freising Manuscripts was an Old Slovene dialect which was spoken in the Carantanian principality (8th / 9th century) and later in duchy Carinthia.

Concentration camp scholarship has been impacted by an ‘island syndrome’: most research limits itself to one site, focuses either on its life or afterlife, and overlooks interactions among functionaries, inmates, and local people. Central themes connected to the camps thus remain shrouded in popular misconceptions. This study breaks with historiographical orthodoxies and addresses common confusions through a new framework. Drawing on Ebensee and the Loiblpass, two forced labour outposts of the Mauthausen complex, it presents the first integrated account of the divergent factors that shaped the legacies of these sites and the fates of their subjects. A focus on Ebensee shows how gravely the local bureaucracy, relief workers, and US Army impacted on the early postwar lives of former camp inmates. Victim groups were marginalised by local and Allied actors precisely because of a broad awareness and continued survivor presence. The Loiblpass figured less prominently in the postwar lives of its surrounding communities. At the core of postwar views lay pre-1945 experiences. Living in an epicentre of territorial struggles, Loibl Valley inhabitants did not externalise a strong political agenda and instead communicated a binary ‘selective association process’. The memory of the camp prompted a positive association in socioeconomic terms; political allusions provoked a relativizing of brutality and a claim to personal victimhood. The local context and postwar dimension constitute a missing link in our understanding of these sites, their neighbouring communities, and the early postwar period more broadly. While the causal relationship between a social reintegration of Nazis and a re-marginalisation of genuine victims has thus far been viewed chiefly through the lens of federal politics, this development was already long under way—aided by all local actors—when amnesty laws encouraging the rehabilitation of former National Socialists came into effect; national and Allied policy decisions in the wake of the burgeoning Cold War only further catalysed this development from 1947 onwards.

In the place names of Slavic or Slovene origin in Upper (and Lower) Carinthia and Eastern Tyrol many sound forms are to be found which are corresponding to those in the Freising Manuscripts, partly in early documents, partly in the contemporary forms also. The language of the Freising Manuscripts was an Old Slovene dialect which was spoken in the Carantanian principality (8th / 9th century) and later in duchy Carinthia.

The article examines (dis)continuities with regard to organisational frameworks, individual careers, ideological foundations as well as practices of nationalist activism in contact zones. On the example of today’s Austrian-Slovenian borderland, the contribution focuses on specific German Nationalist (and later National Socialist) aspirations to homogenize the diverse population of targeted territories in favour of ‘Germanness’. It takes into account the preconditions and histories of German nationalist ‘Grenzland’ consciousness in the Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Styria as well as their neighbouring Slovene territories (Upper Carniola and Lower Styria) and traces the development of what is termed ‘Grenzland’-activism across the ruptures of 1918, 1938/39/41 and 1945 up until the 1970s. With this spatial and temporal focus, the article not only shows the intertwinements of as well as changing emphasis on historical, biological and cultural justifications of this nationalist activism in the context of shifting state borders. By working out and relating the specifics of each phase, the paper at hand also uncovers the striking continuities of ideological, individual and practical aspects of German nationalist activism from its beginnings to the extremist peak during the Nazi period up until the mid-/late 20th century.