1

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

Dr Petra Svoljšak, 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

2

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, Görz) 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 Pleterski’s introductory

3

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

monarchy’s downfall, despite the fact that in the second half of the war realisation

4

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 Slovenian–Austro-Hungarian case, it also

showed how right the military authorities were by trusting – perhaps even more so

5

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 enemy’s 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 volunteer’s

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.

6

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/Soča 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 Soča front had been published in the period of the first

Yugoslavia. Why did the Slovenian front/Soča 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

7

each and every inhabitant of the Slovenian lands? The Soča 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 Soča, 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 Soča 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 Soča 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 Soča 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

8

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 Soča front. For some time the memory of the Soča front

somehow colonized the Slovenian remembrance of the Great War, as the average

Slovenian associates the Great War with the Soča 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.