BETWEEN FORGETTING AND DENYING: the Slovenian memory of World War 1

Dr Petra Svoljak, Associated Professor, ZRC SAZU, Historical Institute, Ljubljana,

Slovenija, University of Nova Gorica
petrasv@zrc-sazu.si

When passions and anxieties were still vivid, everyone spoke about the war and
many tried to share their understanding of it. Everyone had something to say about
it. Here is a clear sign of great historical events, moments in history about which
people continue to speak, Jay Winter and Antoine Proust wrote in the introduction
to their reference work on the First World War, in History; the contemporaries too
were quick to grasp the momentousness of the time they lived in.
Although it is an indisputable fact that the development of every historiography
experiences its ups and downs, its ebbs and flows, one cannot apply this saying
literally to the Slovenian case, because this would presume a continuous
development of memorization and historization that has unfolded uninterruptedly
over the course of several decades. But in the past ninety-five years, Slovenian
remembrance of the First World War oscillated more between triumph and oblivion
than in terms of development ebbs and flows, where oblivion accompanied the
Slovenian historical remembrance of the Austro-Hungarian war experience also at
the time when the First World War was part of the so-called state-building memory
during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War. In fact, the
disintegration of the Habsburg Empire and the formation of a nation state of The
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, caused the oscilation of the Slovenian
memory of World War I between forgetting and triumph, between nearly denying
the war experience shared by the majority of Slovenian men in the defeated and
disintegrated Austro-Hungarian Army and the triumphant rhetoric of the Serbian
and still more emphasised Yugoslav volunteer war experience, characterised by
limited Slovenian participation and minor importance in Slovenian military history.
After the Second World War the First World War had to withdraw from public
memory and historiographical treaties to the margins of remembrance, the Second
World War practically marginalized her older sister, on the other hand it also
changed the perspective of the understanding and interpreting the Great War, as
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Winter and Proust put it the questions posed about the First World War have been
transformed by the Second World War, but this holds true for the western
historiography more than for the central or eastern European and thus also for the
Slovenian historiography and remembrance.
In the process of remembrance of the First World War the year 1914, precisely, the
month that led from the Sarajevo assassination to the outbreak of the war, played a
crucial role in the Slovenian post-war attitude towards the War and the extinguished
monarchy. But before I deepen the argument, I would like to draw your attention to
another issue, which is in a strong connection to the memorization of War, i. e. the
attitude of the Slovenes towards their past homelands (Hapsburg monarchy,
Kingdom of Yugoslavia, socialist Yugoslavia). As my professor Peter Vodopivec has
put it in a recent paper, the image of the three past Slovenian homelands in
textbooks, in historiography and even more in public memory, has been relentlessly
dark. In recent years, the image of the dual monarchy has slightly changed and the
textbooks admit that in the second half of the 19. century the Slovenes had evolved
despite the threats of germanization, into a fully developed nation and that the
majority of the Slovene speaking inhabitants of the Slovenian lands had been
sincerely devoted to the Hapsburg crown and had felt the monarchy as their true
homeland. The aspirations for an independent state had prevailed only when the
internal crises reached the peak and there was no possibility to achieve
compromises.
The patriotic feelings of the majority of the Slovenes at the beginning of the First
World War could thus been traced on three levels: the ethnic Slovenian, the
belonging to one`s land (Carnila, Styria, Littoral, Carinthia, Grz) and dynastic
Hapsburg, which meant above all loyalty to the dynasty and the Kaiser, who was a
political icon (George Strong) that bonded the nations and had been worth of the
trust of his citizens.
The negative attitude towards the Austro-Hungarian monarchy thus rooted maybe in
some more obscure reasons that gained their importance at the end and
immediately after the War, but also for decades to come. As it has already been
mentioned, the year 1914 provoked very different reactions and interpretations in
Slovenian public memory and historiography, and Janko Pleterskis introductory
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sentence in his reference work The First Decision by Slovenes for the Formation of
Yugoslavia from 1971, is still to the point: More than after its onset, the real
attitude of the Slovenes towards the war manifested itself in the days of severe crisis
triggered by the Sarajevo assassination. There is no doubt that the tumultuous
time, which led to the outbreak of the war, decisively distorted the view of World
War I and Austria-Hungary; the perception of Austria as the prison of nations,
although it never appeared in historiography under this name, was the product of
the acutely insightful memorial literature on the creation of the state in the First
Yugoslavia. A member of the Slovenian Preporod (Rebirth) movement, a
revolutionary youth and adherent to the idea of uniting all Southern Slavs by
revolutionary act of breaking the monarchy, Ivan Lah, for instance, wrote: When I
boarded our train in Zemun and heard the Hungarian language, I felt as if I had found
myself in prison (Knjiga Spominov, p. 45).
The critical moment not only in terms of the decision on going to war, but also of the
Slovenian attitude toward Austria-Hungary, was not so much the Sarajevo
assassination, but the July crisis that brought about a very specific internal reactions.
The introduction of a very undemocratic political regime in July 1914, which gave the
military authorities exceptional powers over the civilian sphere and double standard
of the authorities in coping with the political situation in Slovenian lands, caused a
very biased post-war relation towards the monarchy. In July 1914, Slovenian political
leaders publicly expressed their loyalty to the monarchy and Armee ober kommando
recognised the Slovenes as reliable military element. On the other hand, the
political and military authorities implemented extraordinary political measures and
became extremely involved in arresting Slovenian priests and teachers, especially in
Styria and Carinthia. The high-treason trials against the members of the Preporod
movement, arrests, internments and confinements of Slovenian liberal, social
democratic and pro-Yugoslav politicians and professors, together with the
abovementioned persecutions, created a general impression that the entire
Slovenian nation was under threat. There is no doubt that the measures taken by the
Austrian authorities eroded the Slovenes trust in the Austrian state powers-to-be
but not also their loyalty, which ultimately reached its breaking point with the
monarchys downfall, despite the fact that in the second half of the war realisation
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began to sink even in the most ardent pro-Austrian political circles that national
unification was the only possible solution for the national survival in face of the
growing German pressure. But this was not only the case of Slovenian lands and it is
indeed impossible to speak of exceptionally harsh measures directed solely against
the Slovenian citizens of the monarchy, as the impression was in the post-war period
and persisted long after, fanning the flames of the Slovenian political affairs and
score-settlings between the two leading Slovenian political camps, the liberals and
the Catholics.
With regard to the question of loyalty, let us take a brief look at the manifestations
of military loyalty, since political adherence, despite the aforementioned situation,
never raised any doubt until the reconvinion of Vienna parliament in May 1917 and
the May Declaration was presented by the Yugoslav Club, explicitly demanding a
reorganisation of the monarchy and the establishment of the Southern Slavic unit
within the framework of the Habsburg state.
The declaration of war against Serbia stirred a wave of patriotic sentiment among
the inhabitants of the Slovenian provinces, in the spirit of Everything for religion,
home and emperor, which was far from a hackneyed (heknid) catchphrase at the
end of July 1914 and found its meaningful place in the report of the Slovenian liberal
daily Slovenski narod: Come what may, the Slovenes and all other nations will fulfil
all our patriotic duties with fervour. One Slovenian soldier once remarked
sarcastically in his memoirs, that it looked more like the soldiers were setting out
for a wedding rather than war. Although the Austrian military authorities reported
on the influence and development of Southern Slavic ideas especially among
Slovenian intellectuals and confirmed a massive departure of Slovenian volunteers to
join the Serbian and Montenegrin armies at the onset of the Balkan Wars, they never
doubted the loyalty of the Slovenian soldiers to the monarchy on the outbreak of the
war against Serbia and Russia. This was confirmed by reports on mobilisation days
and departures of individual units to the front. What the first month of the First
World War showed was, first and foremost, the great ineptitude and naivety of
those who thought that the victor would soon be known and that the armies would
return home winning eternal glory. In the SlovenianAustro-Hungarian case, it also
showed how right the military authorities were by trusting perhaps even more so
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than the political powers the fighting prowess and especially the loyalty of the
Slovenian members of the Austro-Hungarian Army, despite their devastating war
experience in Galicia. Even though Slovenian post- war public memory witnessed
attempts to find some kind of justification for the loyalty of Slovenian soldiers to the
Austro-Hungarian Army, even by naming the latter foreign army and by publishing
uncorroborated reports on mass desertions to the enemys side, the reality of the
war as well as of subsequent memoirs by soldiers spoke of loyalty rather than their
blind or uncritical acceptance of developments they were part of.
With the downfall of the Hapsburg empire and the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, with a one-month episode of the independent State of
Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, but also due to the loss of one third of national
territories in the following two post- war years, the Slovenian provinces
fundamentally changed their historical perspective. The Austrian idealistic concept
of history was replaced with the ethnocentric Yugoslav concept of history and
remembering. Historical remembrance of the past, including World War 1 presented
a very trying experience in the first Yugoslavia, being the War a unifying and
separating element at the same time and thus caused an extremely discriminating
relationship

between

the

victors/liberators/unifiers

and

the

vanquished/liberated/united. In this situation it was virtually impossible to celebrate

both victory and defeat at the same time. This, however, did not have a decisive
impact on the Slovenian remembrance of World War I, but rather on the position of
the Slovenian war experience in the state-building memory of World War I fostered
in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The later was based on the Yugoslav
identity, achieved during the Great War and emphasising the past of volunteers and
Southern Slavs unification. The Yugoslav state conception and its war mythology
thus only addressed the Slovenian volunteer minority. On the other hand, the period
between the two world wars was significantly more prolific in terms of publications
on the First World War, with a vast corpus of memoires of the war years on the
eastern front, war captivity, military mutinies and above all, the volunteers
movement, which involved not more than 2000 Slovenes. The later adapted to the
central Yugoslav political current in creating the common Yugoslav culture and
uniform memory of the historical events.
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Thus, the only public bearers of the interwar Slovenian memory were Slovenian war
veterans, whose clear objective was to garner public support and acknowledgement
of the efforts made by the Slovenian soldiers during World War I. Slovenian war
veterans had to persuade their Serbian and Montenegrin fellow fighters, whose war
had been crowned by victory, that the Slovenian experience of war should not be
neglected. The reconciliation between the former military opponents was a difficult
and never-terminated process even in the international veteran movement and a
never-solved internal political process within the individual successor states of
Austria-Hungary, including the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where at least two narratives
met and existed in parallel to one another: the Yugoslav/Serbian one and the former
Austro-Hungarian one, which prevented the formation of a uniform Yugoslav
historical discourse of World War I.
The principal activity of Slovenian war veterans was concentrated around the
economic issues of the veterans, war invalids and war widows, their dedication to
the memory of their fallen comrades resulted in more than 160 memorials and
memorial plaques all over Slovenian territory, but they were unable to ensure a
public commemorative place, a central Slovenian memorial or a monument to the
unknown soldier, promoted and somehow adopted by the Slovenian political
hierarchy, whose actual political powerlessness reflected also in inability to provide
the necessary funds for such a monument. On the other hand, the Avala memorial
was constructed as the last attempt of Yugoslav government and the King to confirm
the Yugoslav identity and unity, which could not allow the separate tribal/national
(Slovene, Croat and even Serb) remembrance of the past events.
I would like to draw your attention to one specific and very interesting war
experience, which could or even should, had been in the centre of the Slovenian
public and historical remembrance. This is the memory of the Isonzo/Soa front,
which did not witness a wider public interest, and even less the state/Yugoslav
acknowledgement, Although some of the most striking and powerful memoirs and
newspaper articles on the Soa front had been published in the period of the first
Yugoslavia. Why did the Slovenian front/Soa front remain in the shadow of interwar
Yugoslav remembrance of the Great War, although the war on this front practically
involved the whole Slovenian territory and turned upside down the everyday life of
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each and every inhabitant of the Slovenian lands? The Soa front was certainly not a
Yugoslavia making front, although there had been attempts to organize a volunteer
movement in the Italian front as well. But the Yugoslav Committee decided to
support only the Yugoslav volunteers in the Serbian army, because the Kingdom of
Serbia did not want to compromise the relations with the new ally, although Italy
was promised the Austro-Hungarian territories that could had become a part of the
new Yugoslav state, i.e. the Littoral inhabited by the Slovenes and Croats, a part of
Slovenian territory and some Croat island. The postwar faith of the above mentioned
territories, the Italian occupation immediately after the war and the annexation after
the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920, laid a heavy burden on the memorization of the war
on Soa, although the consequences, the devastation had been seen and lived all
over the territory of the former front. But due to the Italian oppression no public
memory was permitted, not even the unveiling of the memorial plaques or
monuments to the fallen Slovenian soldiers. On the other hand, the Italian
government raised up monumental ossuaries along the whole former front, thus
three also along the Soa river in Kobarid (now in Slovenia), Oslavje (near
Gorizia/Gorica with a very dense Slovenian population) and Redipuglia. If these
could be reasonable explanation for the absence of public memory (including
printed memoires and other writings, as until 1929 the use of any form of Slovene
was prohibited by the fascist regime) and the withdrawal to the private and intimate
sphere, the problem of the non-memorization and the absence of thematization of
the Slovenian front remines opened and un-answered. Not even the Slovenian
veterans who fought on the Soa front wanted to write down their testimonies and
only after many decades, in the 80s of the 20th century many memoires have been
issued, many written more from the point of a soldier that that of a Slovenian soldier
fighting on the Soa front; they usually do not display moral hesitations about
serving in the, as it was usually interpreted in seven decades long Yugoslav period,
foreign army.
The end of the Second World War and the creation of socialist Yugoslavia altered the
Slovenian as well as Yugoslav narration of the First World war events and processes.
This period was marked by the withdrawal from public memory, as well as from
historical debates and publishing, no matter what theme, subject or area. Although
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the themes had not changed, the social revolution brought new perspective, the
social-revolutionary elements were introduced in the historical narrative practices.
The First World War, together with the Isonzo front, became a second class historical
issue., because it did not fit well in neither in the concept of supranational
martyrdom of the partisan liberation movement during World War II, nor in the
concept of brotherhood and unity of the post Second World war socialist Yugoslavia.
Only after 1980`s new, an awaken public interest in World war 1 caused an
increasing interest, producing many war memoirs, exhibitions, private museums and
a systematic and modern historical research. The central theme of the historical
remembrance became the Soa front. For some time the memory of the Soa front
somehow colonized the Slovenian remembrance of the Great War, as the average
Slovenian associates the Great War with the Soa front, thus neglecting a very
important and devastating war year for the Slovenian war experience. The turning
points in Slovenian historiography

on World War war were marked by the

establishing the first museum of the First World War in Kobarid in 1990, the first PhD
in the history of the First World War in 1998 and the first interdisciplinary Slovenian
conference The Great War and the Slovenes was in 2004. Slovenian history of the
First World War was then set in the European context, with the use of terminology
deemed to determine best the multidimensionality of wartime and war experience,
which were transposed into a cultural-historical perspective.
Anyway, the decades-long Slovenian oblivion of the First World War came to an end
quite simultaneously with the democratic changes and the Slovenian state
independence, which could be a mere coincidence. But the fact is, that the historical
remembrance was getting more introverted on one hand, but also contextualized in
a wider European perspective. The last twenty years have been marked by
systematic historical researh, publication of memoires, diaries and a very diversified
museum activities.
The Slovenian perception as well as remembrance of the First World War thus
depended on actual political/historical circumstances and processes, on the actual
Slovenian political influence on the course of historical remembrance in the state
context, the choice state-building historical themes to be politically correctly
thematised and thus becoming an active part of memorial landscape.
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