Carpathian Germans Erotic

Carpathian Germans is a name that came long after the people. For centuries, German speakers in what is now Slovakia saw themselves as people of Pressburg, as Zipsers or as miners of the Hauerland. They lived in three separate areas of settlement, cut off from each other by mountains, dialect and distance. The historian Raimund Friedrich Kaindl coined the broader term. It stuck once the collapse of Austria-Hungary placed these communities inside the new Czechoslovakia, along with smaller German villages in Carpathian Ruthenia, now Zakarpattia in far western Ukraine.

Most of their ancestors arrived in the Middle Ages. Hungarian kings invited them to found towns, clear forest and mine ore, and that need grew urgent after the Mongol invasion of 1241 devastated the kingdom. The Hauerland still carries the mark of that clearing in the name itself, taken from the -hau endings of its village names. The newcomers became the townspeople of the mining towns: Kremnica, whose mint has struck coins since the fourteenth century, silver-rich Banská Štiavnica and copper-rich Banská Bystrica. In the Spiš region, the Zipsers ran a league of self-governing towns under a law code of their own. A cluster of those towns spent more than three centuries pledged to the Polish crown as security for a royal loan. The three areas never merged, and you can hear it in the speech. German around Bratislava leaned Austrian, while the Zips and the mining valleys kept distinct dialects of their own. Nearly everyone also got by in Slovak or Hungarian.

Religion divided along similar lines. The Reformation reached the Zips and the mining towns early, and Lutheran congregations held on through the Counter-Reformation. Kežmarok still has the wooden church they built at a time when Protestant churches had to be made of timber and kept outside the town walls. Even so, Catholics remained the larger group overall.

The twentieth century undid centuries of settlement in less than a decade. During the war, Franz Karmasin's German Party tied the community's organized life to Nazi Germany and the client Slovak State. As the Red Army closed in late in 1944, German authorities moved most Carpathian Germans west. Many who tried to come home were held in internment camps, lost their property under the Beneš decrees and were expelled. In June 1945, Czechoslovak soldiers at Přerov killed more than two hundred refugees on their way home, children among them. Today a few thousand people in Slovakia still declare German nationality, small associations keep the songs and dialects alive, and most descendants live in Germany and Austria.