To walk with the devil Kranjc, Gregor J
To walk with the devil,
2013, 20130311, 2013-02-22, 2013-03-11, 20130101
eBook
Examining archival material and post-war scholarly and popular literature, Kranjc describes the often sharp divide between Communist-era interpretations of collaboration and those of their emigre ...anti-Communist opponents.
This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Slovenia contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries ...on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.
In the initial weeks after the end of World War II, Josip Broz Tito's new communist Yugoslav regime summarily executed perhaps 70,000-100,000 (the figures are estimates and disputed) Yugoslav Axis ...collaborators and opponents of the regime. Public discussion of the killings was taboo in communist Yugoslavia for over three decades. Only in the 1980s, with the loosening of the state's monopoly on the narrative of World War II, were the killings tentatively and reluctantly acknowledged by the regime in Slovenia. Yugoslavia's disintegration and the independence of its constituent republics accelerated this process, and gave way to fierce public debate and polemic, which shows little sign of waning, over the narrative and memory of Slovenia's World War II experience and the postwar killings. Yet missing has been an analysis of the limitations of the language employed in describing and debating the postwar killings, where the use of a single word can betray the assumed ideological convictions of its speaker. "Talking Past Each Other" first offers a historical survey of how the postwar killings have been spoken of (or not) since 1945, navigating the highly divisive contemporary memory politics and memorial landscape in Slovenia. It then examines the ongoing language war over the postwar killings by analysing how suitable some of the more common terms are in describing the killings, including "massacre," "terror," "revolutionary violence," "vengeance/settling of accounts," "war crimes," "crimes against humanity," and "genocide." It finally offers some tentative suggestions for less controversial terminology that may form the basis for a more historically reflective and less divisive discussion.
The expanded third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Slovenia covers personalities and events that have made a mark on Slovenia in the more than a decade since the last edition. This includes ...new entries related to Slovenia’s first 13 years as a member of NATO and the EU, changing diplomatic relations with its neighbors and other global states and institutions, a new crop of politicians who have upended the political status quo, entries related to Slovenia’s worst 21st century recession (2008-2013), nationwide protests against corruption, and many other developments. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Slovenia contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Slovenia.
Using archival evidence, this article reveals atrocities committed by the Varjag regiment, a nominal part of General Vlasov’s anti-communist Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, in ...Slovenia in the final months of World War II. The fact that the Varjag unit mistreated a civilian population that was generally supportive of the Slovene anti-communist domobranci (home guard) units challenges the myth of fraternal solidarity between the Third Reich’s non-German collaborators that was trumpeted in domobranci wartime propaganda. As a corollary, this article also highlights the veil of silence that anti-communist Russian authors as well as anti-communist émigré Slovenes cast on these events from exile in the postwar period. The reticence of survivors to acknowledge or to speak of such events underscores the correlation between personal trauma and memory.
This article examines the remembrance of World War I in Slovenia during three distinct periods of the nation's history: 1918-1941, 1941-1991 and 1991 to the present. The work argues that the memory ...and remembrance of World War I has been categorically underrepresented in the official histories of the last ninety years for a number of political and ideological reasons. Having been tailored to fit a narrative of national liberation and the excising of Habsburg influence during the period of interwar Yugoslavia, World War I was then eclipsed by World War II and most recently independent Slovenia's search for new historical heroes. The effects of this selective remembrance are particularly visible in the changing historiography and the construction or destruction of physical memorials to the Great War in Slovenia. The article argues that the comparatively unknown history of World War I is not unique to Slovenes but is also characteristic of the other successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The officially neglected remembrance of the Great War in East Central Europe stands in stark contrast to the official efforts of western states to keep that memory alive.
