Anatomy of the “deathly silence”: Slovenian newspapers in Carniola and the pre-March censorship

Abstract

The media landscape of the Habsburg Monarchy in the pre-March period was relatively meagre. In Carniola and other Austrian crownlands with a Slovenian population, the opportunities for literary development were limited: this is well evidenced by the ban on the publication of Slavinja in mid-1820 as well as by the many conflicts Krajnska čbelica (‘The Carniolan Bee’) had with censorship in the early 1830s. The modesty of literary activity in Slovenia at this time is often related to the low level of education and literacy among the population, discontinuity in the development of literary culture, and the general underdevelopment of the emerging Slovenian literary and media systems. However, imperial censorship also decisively contributed to this state of affairs. This article therefore outlines the functioning of the pre-March censorship apparatus at the state and local levels, showing how the censorship office in Vienna (headed by the count Josef Sedlnitzky) systematically blocked attempts to establish Slovenian-language periodicals (Slavinja, Slovenske novice ‘Slovenian News’ with its supplement Zora ‘The Dawn’, and Ilirske novice ‘Illyrian News’ with its supplement Ilirski Merkur ‘The Illyrian Mercury’) and how local factors were involved in these processes. It is argued that the power to ban a newspaper had a much stronger impact on the Slovenian press than the activities of local or state censorship. In particular, the long struggle to establish Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (‘Agricultural and Handicraft News’) between 1838 and 1843 testifies to the early tendency of the imperial censorship apparatus to block the respective national(ist) agendas.