Celebrating the National Unity in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes

Summary: According to Gabriella Elgenius, the societal significance of holidays lies in the preservation of collective memory. Annually repeated shared rituals reinforce the memory of those events and personalities that are expected to be familiar to all the members of the community, in effect pushing all other ones into the shadow of collective forgetting. What is more, the emotionally charged commemorations remind members of the community about their social ties and shared history, reinforcing their national identity. The same process occurred in the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where the key players exploited national ceremony to implement their (re)interpretations of the past (as the dark age of national dispersion and slavery to foreign masters) and their new agenda for the future. The Unification Day, celebrated on 1 December, as well as the other state holidays, were supposed to contribute to the formation and reinforcement of the narrative image of a community that defined itself as Us and feels like One. The purpose of the Unification Day was to stage national unity and collectively express the will to belong to a firm and lasting community, in order to make sense of the death of past martyrs who gave their lives for Vidovdan ideals. A nation-state cannot exist without national unity. Regretfully, the ruling elites in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes failed, for various reasons, to nationalise the collective memory of the past and construct an efficient, internalised nationalist ideology. Thus, the Kingdom entered history as the single nation-state without its own nationalism, which meant it was missing the greatest mobilisation force, one that in the modern period has proved itself stronger than geography or religion and more stable than political and economic interests. Even though at the end of the war the citizens of the newly established kingdom were all rooting for Yugoslavia, the new nationstate failed to create the Yugoslavians as a people. It would seem that up until King Alexander’s declaration of dictatorship it had channelled its powers, and even its violence, mostly into the creation of the Serbs

Europe and its Other (i.e. The Balkans)

A pesar que la denominación "Balcanes" parece hacer referencia a una zona geográfica, en realidad esta cadena montañosa no representa ni determina la variedad de territorios, pueblos y culturas que han sido incluidos en esta denominación a lo largo de la historia. A través de un estudio de los libros de viajes a la zona, se identifican las diferentes denominaciones y la construcción de un área ideal que representa la otra Europa, la Europa que recoge la dominación otomana.Although the label "Balkans" seems to be applied to a geographical area, in fact these Mountains do not represent neither the wide variety of territories of the Peninsula nor the peoples and cultures referred with this word. Through the study of the voyagers diaries to the area (among other historical sources), it is shown the different words used and that the label "Balkans" refers mainly to the "Other" Europe, the Europe under the ottoman rule

The Abode of the Other (Museums in German Concentration Camps 1933-1945)

In major German concentration camps, museums were set up with the aim of collecting exhibits and displaying them within a Rassenkunde (race science) framework. As the discourse of racial anthropology was built on the rhetoric of the difference between the ‘pure’ races and people with ‘inferior hereditary quality,’ SS museums put on display ‘pieces of evidence’ with a view to rendering present and visible that which was absent and invisible: the hierarchical order of different races. Thus, collections displayed in SS museums in concentration camps were instrumental in the process of defining the Aryan Übermensch (superhuman) as the personification of all desirable physical, cultural and intellectual attributes, born to conquer and rule the world as a member of the Herrenvolk (master race), and the non-Aryan, above all the Jewish Untermensch (subhuman) as his opposite, a radically other and barely human, suitable only for menial chores. The first museum established in German concentration camps was opened in Dachau early in the 1930s. Similar museums worked in other German concentration camps (Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Auschwitz). The richest was the museum in Gusen I, the sub-camp of Mauthausen. In autumn 1940, when the SS began with the construction of a railway between KZ Gusen I and St Georgen railway station, a grave-yard from the Bronze-Age was found. All the finds were housed in an archaeological museum that was established at the Museumsbaracke (museum barrack) within the camp. By the side of archaeological findings, human skins, skulls and body parts were put on view. At the time of the liberation of Gusen I, on 5 May 1945, a collection of 286 body parts was found and a voluminous album with fragements of tattooed human skin. Today, from all the SS museums’ anthropological exhibits not a single one is on display in the museum exhibitions set up in the former concentration camps. So far, these establishments also escaped the attention of scholarly research. Thus, when I interviewed historians employed in Mauthausen Memorial Museum and in Gusen Visitors’ Centre, in 2005, they were completely unaware of the existence of above-mentioned museums during the war time

St. Vitus Day : a conflicted national holiday

When a new nation-state of southern slavs was established they had to introduce new state symbols and cultural forms in commemorations of historical personalities and events. as the Kingdom of Serbia played such an important role, serbian symbols and commemorations were adopted for the purpose. this meant, that in the state of the ‘nation with three names’, they glorified the Serbian sacrifices and suffering, but denied the contribution of Croats and Slovenes to the establishment of the state community. together with the provisions and spirit of the St. Vitus’ Day Constitution, the glorification of Serbian mythology as the national mythology of the ‘nation with three names,’ which was meant to be the foundation stone for the bright future of the unified nation, became more and more of a stumbling stone.

Miroslav Hubmajer (1851–1910): Danes pozabljen, svoje čase najslavnejši slovenski junak

The Nevesinje Uprising (SCr. Nevesinjska puška, literally ‘Nevesinje Rifle’) marked the beginning of the armed insurgency in Herzegovina on July 9th, 1875. Starting as a peasant revolt, the Herzegovinian insurgency developed into a historical event of seismic importance. It opened the Eastern Question and attracted huge interest among European journalists, politicians, and the public, and especially the Slavic population in neighboring countries followed the developments with keen interest. One of the first to respond to this Slavic cause was Friedrich Hubmayer (later Miroslav Hubmajer), a young Slovenian nationalist from Ljubljana. However, despite his great reputation in the second half of the nineteenth century, Hubmajer is almost completely forgotten today.Nevesinjska puška je 9. julija 1875 napovedala začetek oborožene vstaje v Hercegovini. Začelo se je kot kmečki protest, a se razvilo v hercegovski upor in zgodovinski dogodek v jugozahodni Evropi. Odprto je bilo t. i. vzhodno vprašanje, ki je sprožilo veliko zanimanje evropskih novinarjev, politikov in javnosti, še posebej slovanski prebivalci iz sosednjih držav so z zanimanjem spremljali razvoj. Eden prvih, ki se je odzval pozivu Matere Slave, je bil Friedrich Hubmayer, mladi slovenski nacionalist iz Ljubljane. Kljub svojemu velikemu slovesu v drugi polovici 19. stoletja je skoraj popolnoma pozabljen

Slovenci, Balkan i jugoslavenska ideja, ili kratka priča o dugačkoj kravi

In one of her articles, Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin (2000: 211–36) discusses the choice of words in contemporary Croatian political parlance by which politicians at the end of the twentieth century mobilised their constituency by expressing their attitudes towards what was good and acceptable for Us, and what was bad and thus unacceptable for Our ways. In her enlightening article, full of witty insights, she argues that the notion “Balkan” belongs equally to history and to imagination. Although the Balkans are always east of Us, she suggests, the Balkan mentality is here, with Us, not somewhere else. Rihtman-Auguštin’s article inspired me to analyse the history and image of the term Balkan in Slovene in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is to say, in the period when Slovene national consciousness developed.U jednom od svojih radova Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin (2000: 211–236) raspravlja o izboru riječi u suvremenom hrvatskom političkom govoru kojim su političari krajem dvadesetog stoljeća mobilizirali svoje birače da izraze stavove o tome što Nam je dobro i prihvatljivo, a što Nam je neprihvatljivo. U izvrsnom članku, punom duhovitih uvida, Rihtman-Auguštin pokazuje da koncept Balkana pripada povijesti u istoj mjeri kao i imaginaciji. Premda je Balkan uvijek istočno od Nas, kaže Rihtman-Auguštin, balkanski je mentalitet ovdje, s Nama, a ne negdje drugdje. Njezin me je rad potaknuo da analiziram povijest i predodžbu termina Balkan u slovenskome u drugoj polovici devetnaestog i ranom dvadesetom stoljeću, odnosno u vrijeme kad se razvijala slovenska nacionalna svijest