Reading Post-Socialist Memorial Landscape and 'Cultural Wars': Slovenian Anti-Monuments as Continuation of 1941–45 Civil War?

• In Event: After Civil Wars – Historiography in Divided Society

Abstract

By analyzing the last generation of monuments commemorating Nazi and Fascist collaborators in Slovenia, the author aims to show the way in which the post-socialist memorial landscape prolongs the interpretation of World War II in Slovenia as the Civil War. Judging from inscriptions on the monuments erected in the last three years, members of resistance against the Fascist occupation and other civilian victims of the Nazi occupation are being transformed into perpetrators while the Nazi and Fascist collaborators, organized as Home Guards, are being praised as members of “the Slovenian National Army”. The paper also looks at how the US Embassy in Ljubljana became part of this process. Leaving aside the reasons for the US direct involvement in Slovenian politics of the past, the author tries to reconstruct the circumstances in which, according to the plaque installed on the fence of the Embassy building in the center of Ljubljana, the Partisans, who were the only allies of the US forces in Slovenia, are being ignored while former Nazi and Fascist supporters are being praised as “Slovenes who sought peace” but “could not avoid war”. From this and similar narratives about resistance vs. collaboration, it becomes evident that what started as a confrontation between two interpretations of World War II in Slovenia transformed into an interpretive battlefield for political contestation.

Author

• Oto Luthar, Scientific Research Ctr (Slovenia)