The thesis deals with the study of German and English philology at the University of Ljubljana from the 1919 establishment of the Department of Germanic philology to the Department’s restoration in the aftermath of the war. The first part outlines the history of higher education in Slovenia. The emphasis is on the century-long striving of Slovene intellectuals for the founding of a Slovene university and subsequently on the putting of this idea into effect in the newly established South Slavic state. The central part of the thesis begins with a brief description of the study process at the Faculty of Arts between 1919 and 1945 that serves as the basis for the presentation of the study programmes in German and English philology. The two central chapters, based on primary and archive sources, i.e. the university’s Course calendars as well as the lecturers’ personal files and the students’ matriculation papers of the University archives, aim at presenting the findings of the research on the lecturers, the range of courses and the students of German and English, respectively. Particular attention is paid to the latter aspect given that it was hitherto largely unexplored and thus represented a major research gap in the early history of the Department of Germanic philology. The subsections provide data on the frequency of enrolment and the gender, ethnic, religious and social structure of the student population as well as identify the prominent personalities among the alumni of German and English. The thesis concludes by contextualizing the aforementioned findings in a historical context to shed light on the early history of the Department of Germanic philology. The interplay of the German and English language in the thesis symbolically represents the intertwinement and connectedness of both disciplines at the Department of Germanic philology in the period analyzed. The aim of the thesis is therefore to comprehensively present the development of the study of German and English philology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana between 1919 and 1945, and to process archive material that has not been dealt with to such an extent and for this purpose until now.
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