Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T14:25:40.100Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

FORGETTING DOES (NOT) HURT: Historical Revisionism in Post-Socialist Slovenia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Oto Luthar*
Affiliation:
Zrc Sazu, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Email: [email protected]

Abstract

After the fall of socialism, besides the attempts to reach national reconciliation, radical reconfigurations and reinterpretations of the past were used to negotiate local, national and transnational identities and strengthen national agendas. In most of the formerly socialist countries, the historical interpretation significantly resembles the struggle over the legitimacy and authenticity of this representation. The author argues that in post-socialist Slovenia instead of the anticipated democratization and break with ideologically predestined historical work after 1989, at least three competing politically contaminated ways of interpreting the past gained momentum: the so-called liberal-conformist position, which insists that we have to look at the future and forget the traumas of the past; the revisionist standpoint which, at least in Slovenia, is the most aggressive one; and the objectivistic approach practiced by most Slovenian historians after 1991. To do that the author investigates how collective memories are mobilized in general, formal and in particular more personalized and/or emotional narratives and traces the changes in Slovenian memorial landscape divided into categories: the authoritarian type, defined by a desire for direct colonization of the interpretation of the past related to the Second World War; the conciliatory type that tries to achieve “reconciliation”; the conflicting type that clashes with the iconography of an existing partisan monument as an alternative interpretation.

Type
Special Section: Memeory and Identity in the Yugoslav Successor States
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahačič, Draga. 1992. Osvobodilna ali drzavljanska vojna? / War of Independence or Civil War? Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba.Google Scholar
Aktualni kulturnopolitični komentar revije Zaveza.” Zaveza 78, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Assmann, Aleida. 1993. Arbeit am nationalen Gedaechnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee. Frankfurt am Main – New York: Campus.Google Scholar
Assmann, Jan. 1997. Das Kulturele Gedaechnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitaet fruehen Hochkulturen. Munich: C.H. Beck.Google Scholar
Braun, Robert. 1997. “Holocaust and the Problems of Representation.” In The Postmodern History Reader, edited by Jenkins, Keith. London - New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dežman, Jože. 2003. “Naj se zgodovina odpre.” Interview. Mag 910:4448. Print.Google Scholar
Gabrič, Aleš and Dolenc, Ervin. 2002. Zgodovina 4. Učbenik za 4. letnik gimanzije History 4, textbook for the 4th grade in high school. Ljubljana: DZS.Google Scholar
Godeša, Bojan. 1995. Kdor ni z nami, je proti nam. Slovenski izobraženci med okupatorji, Osvobodilno fronto in protirevolucionarnim taborom Who is Not with Us is Against Us. Slovenian Intellectuals between Occupying Forces, Liberation Front and Counterrevolution. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba.Google Scholar
Jančar, Drago. 1998. Temna stran meseca. Kratka zgodovina totalitarizma v Sloveniji 1941—1990 The dark side of the Moon. A short history of totalitarianism in Slovenia 1941—1990. Ljubljana: Nova revija.Google Scholar
Jergović, Miljenko. 2006. Historijska čitanka 1. Zagreb: vbz.Google Scholar
Kern, Ana Nuša, Nećak, Dušan, Repe, Božo. 2000. Naše stoletje: zgodovina za 8. razred osnovne šole Our Century: History for the 8th grade primary school. Ljubljana: Modrijan.Google Scholar
Kopeček, Michal, (ed). 2008. Past in the Making. Budapest: Central European UP.Google Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1979. “Kriegsdenkmale als Identitaetsstiftungen der Ueberlebenden.” In Identitaet, edited by Marquard, Odo and Stierle, Karlheinz. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore – London: The John Hopkins UP.Google Scholar
Macmillan, Margaret. 2009. The Uses and Abuses of History. London: Profile Books.Google Scholar
Mlakar, Boris. 1999. Slovensko domobranstvo od ustanovitve do umika iz domovine Slovene Home-Guard from Funding until the Retreat from the Homeland) (PhD thesis. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta – Univerza v Ljubljani.Google Scholar
Robin-Marie, Regine. 2009. “The Bifurcation of Memory.” In Politics of Collective Memory. Cultural Patterns of Commemorative Practices in Post-War Europe, edited by Sophie Wahnich, Barabara Lasticova, and Findor, Andrej. Muenster: LIT.Google Scholar
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2008. Theorie der Nachkriegszeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Snyder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. London: Bodley Head.Google Scholar
Tucker, Aviezer. 2008. “Historiographic Revision and Revisionism. The Evidental Difference.” In Past in the Making. Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, edited by Kopeček, Micahal. Budapest: Central European UP.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. Reburial and Postosocialist Change. New York: Columbia UP.Google Scholar
Vukov, Nikolai. 2006. “Public Monuments as Visualization of Death in Socialist Bulgaria between 1944 and 1989.” Centropa 6/3 (September 2006): 215227.Google Scholar
Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.Google Scholar