Katja Sturm-Schnabl

Katja (Stanislawa Katharina) Sturm-Schnabl (born 17 February 1936 in Zinsdorf, municipality of Magdalensberg) is a Carinthian-Slovene linguist and literary historian known for her research and contemporary eyewitness accounts of the 20th century in central Europe.

Life and work Katja Sturm-Schnabl was born into a politically active Slovenian family on a farm in Carinthia, Austria, northeast of Klagenfurt. Her first decisive life experience was the family's deportation in April 1942. Sturm-Schnabl described it this way, "They stormed into the house, shouted incomprehensible things in abrupt sentences (when I was a child I didn't understand German) and there was immediately indescribable chaos in the house... Nemci (Germans) to the left and right and us in the middle, that is how we were taken away, we had to walk through the village." Three and a half years of imprisonment in two camps followed, during which time her ailing older sister Veronika died after receiving an injection by a camp doctor.

After her release from the Eichstätt camp in central Franconia, Sturm-Schnabl attended elementary school and high school in Klagenfurt, and she studied Slavic studies, South Slavic literatures, Russian, art history, and Byzantine studies. In 1973 she received her doctorate with a study on the Slovenian dialect in the Klagenfurt Basin. On 3 October 2019, she received the Vinzenz Rizzi Prize 2019 from the Central Association of Slovenian Organizations in Carinthia and the Slovenian Cultural Association in the Carinthian State Archive in Klagenfurt. On 1 September 2022, she was appointed honorary senator at the University of Vienna because she "was particularly committed to the university and to the fulfillment of her scientific tasks."

Selected publications Journal articles Schnabl, K. Š. (1989). Slovenski narodni preporod in njegovi neposredni odnosi s francoskim razsvetljenstvom in janzenizmom. Zgodovinski časopis, 43(3), 359-363. Sturm-Schnabl, K. (1991). Odmev francoske revolucije na slovenskem Koroškem. Zgodovinski časopis, 45(1), 47-53. Sturm-Schnabl, K. (1995). Dunajska slavistika in njen prispevek k slovenski kulturi. Zgodovinski časopis, 49(3), 411-420. Sturm-Schnabl, K. (2004). Aktualnost Miklošičevega znanstvenega dela in misli. Jezikoslovni zapiski, 10(2). Sturm-Schnabl, K. (2007). Miklosichs Bedeutung für die Slowenistik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Lesebücher für Mittelschulen. Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, 229-239. Sturm-Schnabl, K. (2009). Cultural Nationalism in the South Slav Habsburg Lands in the Early Nineteenth Century: the Scholarly Network of Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844).

Editorial work Berta Bojetu: first international symposium: collection of lectures. Cologne: Mohorjeva, 2005. Bereiche der Slavistik: Festschrift zu Ehren von Josip Hamm. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975.

Encyclopedia of Slovenian cultural history in Carinthia Katja Sturm-Schnabl, Bojan-Ilija Schnabl (ed./Hg.): Enzyklopädie der slowenischen Kulturgeschichte in Kärnten/Carinthia, Von den Anfängen bis 1942. Wien-Köln-Weimar, Böhlau Verlag 2016, 3 vol., 1603 p. http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/bilder/9783205796732.jpg