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

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.

Keywords:

• historical revisionism
• Slovenia, post-socialist historiography
• collaboration
• resistance

View correction statement:

Corrigendum

Notes

LaCapra goes even further, saying that “there are reasons for the visions of history – or at least modern and even more postmodern culture – as traumatic, especially as a symptomatic response to a felt implication in excess and disorientation which may have to be undergone or even acted out …, ” 2001, ix–xi.

Here I refer to a failed attempt to reach national reconciliation in 1990 after the first multi-party elections, by the joint commemoration of the president of the state and the Catholic Church. Similar inability to reach national reconciliation throughout the 1990s was marked by the unsuccessful legislative provisions and the proposal to erect a joint monument to all the victims of Second World War.

Here the term (historical) revisionism is understood as a practice of radical reinterpretation of the past that is unequally founded on the penchant for therapeutic values over cognitive values. Similar to Aviezer Tucker I understand it as revised historiography that is immune to the effect of evidence (see Tucker 2008, 3). Furthermore, the term is used here to describe the process of post-socialist radical reinterpretation of the most traumatic aspects of the past of Eastern European countries in the twentieth century. The term is, needless to say, inadequate. But for the time being I see no alternatives. Negationism, monopolization of the memory, distortion of history, rewriting, reinventing, redefining, re-evaluating, re-reading, abusing, erasing, changing, colonizing, … the past do not cover the whole spectrum, therefore the search for a more adequate term continues.

Perhaps the best example of such attempts is a reader edited by Drago Jančar (Jančar 1998).

I borrow the term from Dominic LaCapra who distinguishes two approaches to historiography. The first is what he terms a documentary or self-sufficient research model, and the second approach – which is the negative mirror of the first – and that is radical constructivism. The second one has received its most articulate defenders in such important figures as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, who accept the distinction between historical and fictional statements on the level of reference to events, but question it on the structural level. See LaCapra 2001, 1–8.

As in trauma, numbing (the objectification and splitting of object from subject including self-as-subject from self-as-object) is for the Slovenian historian functioning as a protective shield or preservative against unproblematic identification with the experience of others and the possibility of being traumatized by it. But, as LaCapra argues: “objectivity should not be identified with objectivism or exclusive objectification that denies or forecloses empathy, just as empathy should not be conflated with unchecked identification, vicarious experience, and surrogate victimage.” Ibid: 40.

See also pages 370 through 398.