An Overview of the Collections

The POLOS database contains a selection of postcards from various institutions and private collections. Each of these collections has a different structure and set of priorities, depending on each collection’s focus, date of origin, geographical location, etc.The POLOS database as a whole is focused on how languages were distributed within the individual collections.*

(1) Printed Text

During the monarchy, about one third of Styria was inhabited by speakers of Slovene, and most of them lived in Lower Styria. As a result, Lower Styria was primarily Slovene speaking, except for the cities with a strong German influence. Interestingly, this predominance of Slovene is not reflected in the postcards' printed text. Nevertheless, postcards from Lower Styria often contain traces of bilingualism.** The proportion of text printed in Slovene ranges from six to twenty percent, while that of bilingual text ranges from six to fourteen percent. The predominance of German is visible throughout all of the individual collections and, depending on the collection, comprises between sixty-six and eighty-six percent of all printed text.

These proportions of printed text do correspond to population distribution, and thus raise certain questions. For example, who produced these postcards? Who commissioned them and had the necessary financial capital to put them into circulation? Who bought them, who used them, and for which occasions, thereby shaping the postcard market? The importance of German as a lingua franca, which Slovene speakers also used, must be taken into account when looking at the language distribution on postcards. However, the relevance of large postcard publishers from Graz, Vienna, or the German Empire must also be considered when assessing these distribution patterns.

(2) Handwritten Messages

A slightly different picture emerges when looking at the handwritten messages on postcards. Unlike the printed texts, this was a result of individual appropriation. The proportion of Slovene ranges from four to thirty-six percent, depending on the collection, and is obviously higher than for printed texts. But it is important to note that these figures also do not reflect population distribution, as many Slovene speakers used German when writing postcards, which is not obvious in these diagrams. In addition, the proportion of messages in other languages, such as Czech, Hungarian or Croatian, vary between two and sixteen percent, depending on the collection. This demonstrates that postcards were used not only by inhabitants of Lower Styria but also by travelers passing through.***

(3) Focus of the Collections

Last but not least, when assessing these distribution ratios, it is also important to consider how these collections were created. Institutional postcard collections are usually made up of donations, and in most cases, come from the estates of individuals from the immediate vicinity that were left to relevant institutions. Depending on the geographic location, this also results in different linguistic emphases within the collections.

In addition, regional libraries have different rationales behind creating collections than national institutions like national libraries might have. Our regional postcard collections were primarily focused on postcards of their own city and its immediate surroundings, while a supralocal or national collection will generally want to represent an entire region or area of a particular ethnic group. More recent rationales behind sorting and collecting by public institutions have been guided by ethnic categories as well as by subsequently-drawn state and administrative boundaries. For example, the postcard collection at the Slovenian National and University Library tends to reflect a more “Slovene” Lower Styria than the postcard collection at the Styrian Provincial Archives in Graz.

There are also particular rationales behind the creation of private collections. These are determined according to collectors’ different goals and interests as well as varying market conditions. For example, if a collector purchases postcards primarily at flea markets in Vienna or Klagenfurt, these will often contain German text, since many of the postcards at these markets circulated in these same predominantly German-speaking cities or regions. Conversely, if postcards are acquired from postcard collectors specializing in a Slovene-speaking region, the percentage of postcards written or printed in Slovene would naturally be higher. But now with the shift from flea market sales to internet searches, these conditions have changed.

A selection of 2,500 postcards were culled for the POLOS digital archive from these large collections belonging to partner institutions and private individuals. The selection process was guided by specific research questions: I) How can postcards provide evidence of intensifying linguistic and ethnic polarization in this particular region, and (II) How are bilingualism and national indifference also represented by postcards? As a result, the POLOS database contains a larger percentage of postcards with text printed and written in Slovene than the percentage of what was produced and/or circulated.

*All postcards from these collections that contained views of Lower Styria and were produced in or before 1918 were included. Representative samples of 200 postcards from Maribor, Celje, and Ptuj were chosen from each collection.
** The term bilingual refers to the use of more than language (usually Slovene and German) on a postcard. When used to describe captions, it refers to greetings and toponyms in German and Slovene. When used to describe handwritten messages, it can mean that either different people wrote in different languages, or a message from a single writer includes some form of language contact including bilingual or diglottic use, code switching, or other hybrid lexical forms.
*** The proportion of unused cards (i.e., never written on) per collection was determined as well. However, these unused cards are not represented in the diagrams, since the main focus is the language distribution in the handwritten messages.