Draft:Eberhard Kranzmayer

Eberhard Kranzmayer (1897-1975) was an Austrian philologist, dialectologist and, prior to 1945, also ethnologist of the German language. Kranzmayer has long been considered the most important dialectologist of German in Austria, yet his incisive and powerful roles in the Third Reich and his rasist perspectives on German, surfacing fully in the early 2020s, have only in the 2010s and 2020s been critically scrutinized.

Life and education

Kranzmayer was born the youngest of six children into a Klagenfurt, Carinthia, family of coppersmiths of long local lineage. He learned, atypical for Carinthian's native German speakers during the Habsburg Empire, Slovene with a local farm family. He studied at the University of Vienna, defending his dissertation under Anton Pfalz, then leader of the Austrian Academy of Sciences project Dictionary of Austrian-Bavarian Dialects (DABD) in Vienna, in 1926. He had regularly worked for the DABD since 1916, as a high school student, and during his studies. In 1926, he was tasked to coordinate the data collection with the sister project in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects (DBD). Both projects are ongoing and together the define the cross-border Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German. In 1933, he defended his "habilitation" with anti-Semite Rudolf Much, from which point on he was a full-fledged academic researcher and teacher.

Nazi connections

Kranzmayer is documented to have celebrated Hitler's power take-over in Germany in 1933. He continued to work in Vienna until December 1937; he is today considered as "definitely" a member of the then illegal Nazi party as of 1 January 1937, though likely much earlier. By January 1938, no two months before Anschluss, Kranzmayer moved to the Bavarian Academy's sister project as the leader of the DBD. Within five weeks after Anschluss, Kranzmayer reported with Anton Pfalz on their recording trips throughout Austria, what had by then become Germany's Ostmark, for Adolf Hitler's birthday present 1939.

Third Reich career

Kranzmayer was long considered to have been a "victim" of unfair denazification proceedings in accounts that circulate in German linguistics circles to this day. Despite Austrian Slavists pointing out as early as 1980 that Kranzmayer was a proponent of "völkische[] Linguistik", even today major proponents of German dialectology do not concede issues of bias with Kranzmayer's data, which is used to complete Kranzmayer's projects.

In 1942, Kranzmayer became Director of the newly founded, "war-decisive", sarcastically named "Research Institute for Carinthian Provincial Research". Until a month before the institute's official and public opening in Klagenfurt, this institute, founded during Operation Barbarossa, was called 'Institute for the final solution of the Slovenes'.

Kranzmayer, however, is shown to have perjured himself in both his denazification proceedings, one in 1945 the other in 1947. As leader of a "war-decisive" think tank that offered pseudo-scholarly assessments of the "purity" or "impurity" of the Slavic population in regards to German-dom by linguistic means, Kranzmayer is responsible for providing the rationale behind ethnic cleansing for at least 205,000 Slovenes in Upper Carinola ("Oberkrain").

Kranzmayer's active commitment to Nazism continued at least until December of 1944, when he is documented to have requested, in direct correspondence with Reichsminister Bernhard Rust, who had like Kranzmayer studied German philology, the additional positions of a "race biologist" and a librarian for his Nazi-research Institute in Klagenfurt.

Major Works

• Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1971 (Vol. 1), ongoing (editor from 1926 to 1975).
• Bayerisches Wörterbuch, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ongoing (chief editor from 1938 to 45)
• Kärntner Ortsnamenbuch, 2 vols. (1956-58).
• Bayerischer Dialektatlas (1956).
• [in German] Race-biological perspectives on the German language. Textbook (1944-45), manuscript lost or missing, post WWII.
• Die deutschen Lehnwörter im Slowenischen (1944). Written for the Nazis.
• Die Sprache der Friauler (1943). Written for the Nazis.

Impact and re-assessment

In light of findings such as Kranzmayer's role in the justification and application of ethnic cleansing of the SS and the Wehrmacht in the east, a call for a complete reassessment of Kranzmayer's work in German dialectology and onomastics, the two areas of inquiry in which Kranzmayer has held considerable sway until the present, has been voiced In particular, Kranzmayer's "race-biological account on language change", delivered as his July 1944 University of Graz inaugural lecture to great interest of Nazi politicians in Gau Styria, and distributed in several copies before war's end, still remains to be located.

Recent work reassesses that by 1936,

"Kranzmayer had worked on his völkisch onomastics and dialectology for more than a decade; his writings supported a key thesis in the Third Reich, the superiority of the German race. “Die Geschichte des Volkes spiegelt sich wirklichkeitsgetreu in seiner Sprache!,” writes Kranzmayer, a statement which he supplements with his own axiom that “Die Geschichte zwischenvölkischer Beziehungen zeigt in den Lehnwörtern ihr getreues Abbild!” [English: "the history of ethnic relationships shows it's true refkection in its loanwords" (Kranzmayer, 1944, Die deutschen Lehnwörter in der slowenischen Volkssprache, p. 28)".

A statement that Kranzmayer consistently interpreted from the superiority of all things German. German supremacy was unquestioned to a degree that Kranzmayer, who had a doubtful practice of data reporting, hypothesized of yet-to-be-discovered data that would support his German First interpretations. Kranzmayer has been suggested as a major proponent of carrying the One Standard German Axiom beyond WWII into the present, which may explain prevailing scepticism in German linguistics over Standard Austrian German and multiple standards of German more generally.