Beyond post-socialist memory : politics of the past in Slovenia from the Cold War to the present

Abstract

This essay focuses on the memorial landscape and on the on-going reinterpretations of the traumatic events of World War II in Slovenia and in its western borderland. The area is part of the European Union and nowadays shared by Slovenia, Croatia and Italy. In the 20th Century it often functioned as a powerful symbolic boundary, one in which several key axes of European and global symbolic geography intersect: the West and the East, German, Latin and Slav Worlds, Europe and the Balkans, fascism and anti-fascism, liberal democracy, capitalism and communism. With the aim to overcome dichotomic ideological and ethnic/national explanations, grassroots memory cultures are analyzed. This shows us first, that politics of memory are not a merely imposition of the state in a unilateral top-down direction, and secondly, how state-sponsored initiatives have to negotiate in a border context. Here, Slovenia and the nowadays Italo-Slovene borderland is thus used as a tool to investigate global processes of remembering.