Prof. John Tschinkel
The Bells Ring No More - an autobiographical history, 2010
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| 01. | Foreword |
The Bells Ring No More
Reviews from the Slovene press.
“There is little in the recent past that moved me as much as the tale of John Tschinkel, revealed in his book The Bells Ring No More. Of the Gottschee Germans who for six long centuries lived a part of southern Slovenia we know very little. It is therefore even more precious to read the revelations of one who describes his early life there, his roots and the fate of his family in such a simple and sensitive manner. He left behind him a trail that can not be erased”.
Zlatica Kasal, Primorske Novice, Oktober, 2010
“The bells in Tschinkel’s book, in addition to ringing historical and ethnographic melodies, above all ring a melody of the tragic destiny of over twelve thousand members of a people who had surrendered to the ideological fanaticism of Nazi youths. Youths, who were assigned the task of convincing their own people to give up their homes and way of life for nothing more than a promise”.
Milan Vogel, DELO, November, 2010
“The author grew up in a self sufficient village in Slovenia until its entire population surrendered to the pressure to resettle in 1941. Not ‘Home to the Reich’ as promised, but to another part of annexed and ethnically cleansed Slovenia from where they were expelled in 1945 to become homeless refugees. He settled in America in 1950.
The book is a merging of at least four aspects of a story running in parallel: history, politics, cultural awareness and personal narrative. Because of this intertwining, the tale never gets boring. The expressive power of the book has several peaks. The last is the description of how the family is trying to outrun the Communist Partisans”.
Prof., Dr. Marjan Kordaš,
Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, December, 2010
“With his memoirs, intertwined with historical facts and data, John Tschinkel has made certain that the fate of the Gottscheer will not be forgotten. With the critical distance of an educated American immigrant, one who can not get rid of a burning sense of permanent loss, he has assembled a coherent mosaic of a vanished community”.
Mojca Ramšak, Večer, January 2011
Excerpts from the Foreword
“Most serious historians would estimate that at least 40 million people perished in the death camps and on the killing fields of World War Two. In the face of such a figure, it should cause no surprise that they received more attention than the millions who ‘merely’ lost their homes, were uprooted or ethnically cleansed …
John Tschinkel’s autobiographical history deals with a small and relatively unknown group of such persons, the Gottschee Germans… . For six hundred years this former enclave in Slovenia survived and even prospered under the generally benign sovereignty of Habsburg Austria ...
Fundamentally, the Gottschee Germans, like countless other ethnic German groups in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, fell victim to Third Reich blandishments, entreaties, threats and downright coercion to ‘return home’. When they voted overwhelmingly to do so, they were resettled not within Germany proper, but in a nearby part of Slovenia that had been annexed and brutally cleansed of its Slavic population on Himmler’s orders. …
In their new land they were surrounded by hostile elements, including the ethnically cleansed Slovenes whose homes had been seized and given to the Gottscheer. Of these 37,000 Slovenes, a large number never returned from forced labour in the Reich. As the war came to an end, the Gottscheer found themselves deprived of ancestral territory to which they could return. ..
They finally set off on foot and in horse-drawn wagons; not to their former homes but to exile …
Tschinkel is an American immigrant of mixed parentage, with an ethnic German father and a Slovene mother. Brought up to be both bilingual and bicultural he is able to draw on many sources to buttress and lend substance to the historical framework and scope of his chronicle, for he sets off his personal recollections against a broad canvas depicting what this ethnic island was in the twentieth century and how it had arrived there” .
Peter Foulkes, Former Professor of German Studies, Dean of Humanities Stanford University, California. Emeritus Professor, University of Wales
Foreword
Most serious historians would estimate that at least 40 million people perished in the death camps and on the killing fields of World War Two. In the face of such a figure, it should cause no surprise that those who died in that terrible conflict have received more attention than the millions who ‘merely’ lost their homes, were uprooted or ethnically cleansed, fled before invading armies, secret police, shells and bombs. Sometimes people fled through fear; and sometimes they were driven by a sense of guilt about what had been done in their name. In some cases they were driven out of their homes by a native population bent on vengeance after years of servitude and terror. Others were deported en masse because they were considered to be a threat, while some moved because they themselves were deemed to be threatened. Although World War Two ended in Europe in May 1945, for months and years afterwards there were still floods of refugees, or Displaced Persons as they were called at the time, seeking to rebuild their shattered lives amidst the ruins of destruction.
John Tschinkel’s autobiographical history The Bells Ring No More deals with a small and relatively unknown group of such persons, the Gottschee Germans. Gottschee is an area of around 400 square miles in the south of Slovenia. In the early 14th century this heavily forested region of Carniola, then owned by the counts of Ortenburg, was settled by Germans from the north-west, who cleared and worked the land, built towns and villages, and mostly lived in peace, strained at times, with their Slavic neighbours. For six hundred years this German language enclave survived and even prospered, first as an outpost of the heterogeneous Holy Roman Empire and later under the generally benign sovereignty of Habsburg Austria. Throughout this period they retained their culture and their antiquated German dialect. Following World War One and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gottschee was incorporated into what would become Yugoslavia, and is today the municipality of Kočevsko in Slovenia, which has been a member of the European Union since 2004. The city of Gottschee has reverted to its Slovene name of Kočevje.
In the late nineteenth century Gottschee had a population of some 23,000, and although a steady stream of inhabitants left to seek their fortunes in the New World over the years, the area was still a thriving and viable German language enclave in the twentieth century. At the beginning of World War Two there were around 12,500 ethnic Germans left in the region, the others by then having settled in the USA. Today, however, there are scarcely any traces of these people still to be found in their traditional homeland. Their German dialect, already an anachronism centuries ago, is now virtually extinct in its ancestral home.
Whole villages have disappeared either through destruction as part of fierce battles between the defenders and occupiers, be they Italian or German, or by being allowed to fall into ruin; churches have suffered the same fate, and even graveyards have been obliterated and stripped of German inscriptions. The thick carpet of forest, laboriously cleared over the centuries to make room for crops and animals, has returned and again covers much of the area.
How and why did this happen? There are no straightforward answers to this question, and John Tschinkel, in making his own personal contribution to an ongoing debate, is well aware that he is stepping into a realm in which history, memory, propaganda and deceit mingle and coexist in an uneasy and constantly shifting relationship.
The disappearance of the Gottschee Germans is by no means a mystery, however, for numerous archives, personal accounts and historical studies have dealt with the events from various viewpoints; the basic sequence of events is not in question. Hans Hermann Frensing, building on the pioneering work of the eminent Slovenian historian Tone Ferenc, provided a sober and meticulous history (1970), which examines in detail the relevant archives covering the final years of the Gottschee community. Frensing’s study constitutes a balanced and well documented description and analysis of the events in the 1930s and early 1940s that led to the dissolution of a culture that had endured for six centuries. His account is valuable mostly as a step by step analysis of the archival material, detailing the methods and subterfuges, intentions and effects of National Socialist policies that created turmoil and upheaval in Gottschee as they did throughout Europe.
Fundamentally, the Gottschee Germans, like countless other ethnic German groups in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, fell victim to Third Reich blandishments, entreaties, threats and downright coercion to ‘return home’. When they voted overwhelmingly to do so, they were resettled not within Germany proper, but in a nearby part of Slovenia that had been annexed and brutally cleansed of its Slavic population on Himmler’s orders in order to make room for the newcomers, whose task was to strengthen ‘Germanness’ on the southern flank of the newly expanded Reich.
As World War Two ground on to its inevitable conclusion and the total destruction of the Third Reich, the hapless transplanted Gottschee people found themselves adrift in a limbo over which they had little control. They had given up their ancestral lands and homes, voting to return to a Germany that had not merely betrayed them in several ways, but had in fact managed to contrive a situation in which they would themselves be subject to intolerable pressure by Yugoslav partisans and the expelled Slovenes, some of whom had vanished into the parts of Slovenia occupied by Italy and were eager to return. As ethnic Germans, moreover, the Gottscheers were associated in the eyes of many in Yugoslavia with the brutalities and atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi occupiers and their accomplices, and it comes as no surprise that they fled into neighbouring Austria, from where many of them moved to Germany or emigrated to the US, Canada and other countries.
So while there is no dispute concerning the major events that culminated in the dissolution of the Gottschee community, every stage in its dissolution has been subject to acrimonious disagreement concerning the causes and interpretation of those events, and these disagreements persist to the present day. The inhabitants of Gottschee, for example, did indeed vote in 1941 for resettlement, but when they cast their votes, they were under the mistaken impression that they were ‘going home’ to the Reich, whereas their leaders and Himmler’s functionaries knew that they were to be resettled within a nearby part of Slovenia.
Nor can the vote be regarded as free in any normal sense, since the Nazis deployed their full arsenal of persuasion, deception and coercion, tactics already well rehearsed in Czechoslovakia, Poland and South Tyrol, in order to guarantee the vote they wanted. Agitators were sent in from the Third Reich, and local people were recruited, trained and given the task of softening up the voters. Dissenters were vilified as enemies of the people and vermin (“Volksschädlinge”). They were threatened with imprisonment in concentration camps, and at the same time intimidated by rumours claiming falsely that the Italians, who had been allowed to occupy part of Slovenia, including Gottschee, intended to ship to Sicily or even Abyssinia all those who refused to sign up for resettlement in greater Germany.
In their new land they were surrounded by hostile elements, including the ethnically cleansed Slovenes whose homes had been seized and given to the Gottscheers. Of these 37,000 Slovenes, a large number never returned from forced labour in the Reich, another reason for the growing enmity and desire for revenge. As the war came to an end, the Gottscheers, who had voted to give up their Slovenian citizenship and homes in exchange for citizenship of the Third Reich thus found themselves deprived of ancestral territory to which they could return.
They finally set off on foot and in horse-drawn wagons to achieve what had been promised to them in 1941, the return ‘home’, a home from which their ancestors had departed six centuries earlier. This nightmare journey across a collapsing and war-torn corner of Europe has been represented variously as a flight from Tito’s partisans, an expulsion carried out by vengeful Slovenes, or as a conscious intention to escape from an Eastern Europe that looked likely to fall into the orbit of the communist Soviet Union. To some extent, it contained elements of all these things, but it was also an attempt to escape from the knowledge of monstrous crimes and self-deception on a massive scale, one further stage in the development of a national repressed memory syndrome, a problem that has beset Germany in one form or another ever since the 1930s.
These arguments are still taking place at meetings, in newspapers, chat rooms and on websites around the world. Like many disagreements concerning the interpretation of historical events, the rhetoric used is at times intemperate and heated, reminiscent of the scurrilous language used by the Nazi supporters of resettlement in the early 1940s. Some of the people commenting on the events were in fact Nazi supporters of resettlement at that time, and ironically they have used the current debate in order to obfuscate matters and to create confusion about their own role.
John Tschinkel’s book is primarily a deeply personal and at times painful contribution to the ongoing debate about Gottschee. The bells that no longer ring, featured in his title and front cover, are those of the Roman Catholic chapel in Grčarice (Masern), the Gottschee village where the author was born in 1931 and where he spent the first ten years of his life. His aim in writing the book, he states, was to make a permanent record of experiences and memories that would otherwise slip into oblivion. This initial intention was later supplemented by a desire to set the record straight in the face of a resurgence of the strident and deceitful rhetoric first used by the National Socialist supporters of resettlement. One example of this was the 1955 renaissance of the Gottscheer Zeitung in Klagenfurt, Austria, under the editorship of the person who had edited it in Gottschee in the late thirties and early forties, when it was beating the drum for Hitler’s Third Reich and the desirability of resettling there.
Tschinkel’s focus is on his own experiences during these years, and his major contribution to our knowledge of the events is the series of vividly recalled incidents, anecdotes and memories, recounted with a powerful narrative skill and an authorial voice that is at times wry, ironic, angry and frustrated, but always deeply humane and striving for a balanced vision. Unlike most of those who have commented on the events, Tschinkel, an American is of mixed parentage, with an ethnic German father and a Slovene mother. In his early years he was brought up to be both bilingual and bicultural, and he is able draw on many sources to buttress and lend substance to the historical framework and scope of his chronicle, for he is determined to set off his personal recollections against a broad canvas depicting what Gottschee was in the twentieth century and how it had arrived there.
And above all, what was being lost forever when the Gottscheer Germans fatefully embarked on their journey just three and a half years before Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich came to its ignominious end. The bells that ‘ring no more’ become powerful and recurrent symbols marking the phases and cycles of a vibrant culture, with its births and deaths, dangers and ecstasies, past and future. They are the ‘blue remembered hills’ of a narrative permeated by an aching sense of loss and a growing consciousness that the collective future is slowly but inexorably blurring into nothing.
The author is too skilful a narrator to lay claim to having witnessed personally all the events described, even those where he was clearly present. He deals with this adroitly in his second chapter in which the details of his own arrival, filtered through the memory of his older sister Mitzi and his own later experience of his younger brother’s birth, are used as focal points for a gradually enlarged picture placing his home village within its historical and geographical framework. This frame is further marked out between two central points in time: December 7, 1941, when the family set off on their fruitless resettlement to what village leaders had been calling the land of ‘milk and honey’, and a return trip in 1974, when he was able to see that while ‘much had changed . . . much had also remained the same.’ Slovenian relatives of his mother had prepared him what to expect: ‘It still snows as it used to and the basin still fills and overflows in the spring when the snows melt in the hills. But the cistern in the basin behind the church, once the main watering place for the livestock and the fire pumps, is no longer used and is crumbling away. Weeds cover the ruins’.
The plangency and power of Tschinkel’s narrative spring in part from this tension between remembered past and present experience, in which vividly captured moments of childhood and adolescence blend with historical and cultural knowledge to form a coherent mosaic of a vanished community. All is pieced together with affection and ruefulness, and illuminated further through the prism of the author’s post-war emigration to the USA, where his education and professional life as an engineer provide new contexts of interpretation and evaluation for his earlier life.
It is, however, these lively and compelling snapshots of the author’s first fourteen years that represent the essence and enduring quality of Tschinkel’s contribution, for they bring a welcome human dimension to the necessarily drier and more dispassionate historical studies. As such they offer a lively and at times grimly humorous correction to other personal accounts, which are mostly flimsier and more narrowly focused than Tschinkel, and are sometimes tendentious and self-serving to the point of caricature. An early image of the narrator as a boy, surrounded by an ocean of brilliant chamomile flowers, gives way to the picture of his mother holding the head of the ailing family horse Yiorgo so that his father could pour a soothing and medicinal chamomile extract into the animal’s mouth. The wiser and older boy then makes a brief appearance in order to impart the insight that chamomile tea was ‘the standard cure for most ailments of man and beast . . . especially if fortified with a generous portion of slivovitz.’ Later we witness the youthful Tschinkel falling in a faint in his Hitler Youth uniform on parade one stiflingly hot summer day. His emotions were shame and despair that his weakness might be attributed to his mixed racial heritage.
There is a good deal of humour in Tschinkel’s account, and on one level it could be placed in the genre or tradition of amusing pictures of village life. The humour, entertaining though it is, is also a foil that etches out with greater clarity a darkness, a deep sense of foreboding that runs through the narrative. Sometimes this is achieved literally, as in the passages describing the Tschinkel family’s arrival in their new home during the resettlement. The villages and houses are strangely empty, and when the bus passes the walls of the village cemetery, the author adds, ‘in which, in the very near future, were to be buried two of my best friends.’ A few minutes later the parents and their three children are dropped off in front of a house, while ‘the bus backed out and returned to the centre of the village, leaving us standing in the few inches of newly fallen snow.’ Inside the bitterly cold house there awaited more ominous surprises, for it was clear from the unwashed dishes and unmade beds that its previous occupants had departed in haste and probably fear, the realization of which brought Tschinkel’s father to tears, which he sought unsuccessfully to conceal from his children by stepping outside to inspect the stable and barn.
And then there is the chapter entitled The Rabbit, in which humour and horror are played out against a growing sense of historical understanding that takes years to develop into a full awareness of what had happened. The chapter is devoted to the author’s close friendship with a boy from school, Josef, whose Gottscheer family had been allocated a farm some distance from the village. In addition to spear fishing, the two friends shared a passion for rabbits, which they prized as pets but also raised as a supplement to the families’ meat ration. Josef was the proud owner of a dominant male, a ‘beautiful rabbit with smooth and shining grey fur twice the size of any other in the stables of the village’. He was called Adolf, and was greatly admired by John who was allowed to take him home for a few weeks, where he created havoc by attacking John’s own male rabbits and by impregnating the females too quickly for the planned sequence of meat supplies.
In the autumn of 1943 Josef arrived at John’s house in an agitated and breathless state. He had run two kilometers from his home, in order to tell his friend that he and his family were being forced to leave the village immediately, and to request him to look after Adolf for the time-being. John went back with Josef, where he found his friend’s mother and sister in tears and his father loading suitcases on to a truck under the gaze of the Gestapo. After a hasty handshake Josef was made to join his sister and parents in the back of the truck, and they were driven off leaving John ‘standing alone in the middle of the courtyard.’
He returned home with Adolf, and a few weeks later received a postcard from Josef saying that the family were happily settled in their new home, which a local Nazi official had explained to the uneasy villagers was situated in the old Reich and that the family had been sent there since they were deemed too unreliable to serve as guardians of Greater Germany’s southern border. The card contained no return address, and had been mailed from Poland. John discovered later that Josef’s mother was a Gypsy. Later still he discovered what was happening to Gypsies, Jews and other ‘undesirables’ during and after those idyllic summer and autumn months of 1943 that he had spent in the company of Josef.
Adolf, with a fine sense of historical irony, survived until the spring of 1945, when he was shot and eaten by a group of thuggish SS men who took over the Tschinkels’ home and beds for a night as they fled before the advancing partisans. Years later John Tschinkel suffered from a recurrent nightmare in which ‘Josef merged into the body of the dying Adolf dragging himself across the dirt’.
The Bells Ring No More ends on a note which encapsulates the whole narrative and could serve as a chilling reminder of how the National Socialists betrayed the people of Gottschee as well as their ethnic brethren within and outside the Reich. Shortly before they complete the final steps of their journey across the border into Austria, the Gottscheer pass an embankment bearing four words written in huge capital letters:
WIR DANKEN UNSEREM FÜHRER
Tschinkel comments, ‘Plain for all to contemplate, in silence, the four words of now bitter irony, words we had been made to utter so often in mass rallies during the summer of 1941 and the years after that without really knowing why’.
Peter Foulkes, Former Professor of German Studies, Dean of Humanities Stanford University, California. Emeritus Professor, University of Wales.
www.gottschee.de
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