Borderlands of Memory

Borderlands of Memory

Adriatic and Central European Perspectives

Borut Klabjan (ed.)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

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Cover image: Monumental Landscape in the Northern Adriatic, by Alenka Obid and Tilen Glavina. Photos from the archives of Science and Research Centre Koper and Europeana.

ISSN 2235-2325

ISBN 978-1-78874-134-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-135-4 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78874-136-1 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-137-8 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2019

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

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This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the editor

Borut Klabjan is Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and Senior Research Fellow at the Science and Research Centre in Koper.

About the book

‘‘This timely volume puts the latest conceptual and methodological insights from border studies in service to understanding the lands of the former Habsburg Empire, a region constituted by overlapping cultural, linguistic and political boundaries. Covering a wide range of cultural products, such as film, novels, architecture and monuments, the essays illuminate the enduring legacies of historical bordermaking processes in both memory and the built environment. An important contribution to literatures on the Adriatic, Central Europe and borderlands more generally that showcases current work by preeminent scholars in the field.’ – Pamela Ballinger, Professor of History, Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights, University of Michigan

‘The volume fruitfully sits at the crossroads of memory studies, nationalism studies and border studies. The mnemonic entanglements of late imperial times, the WorldWars, the ColdWar and its aftermath are vividly made palpable and represent a quintessential pars pro toto of European memoryscapes of the twentieth century.’ – Sabine Rutar, Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg

The complex intertwining of history, memory, space, place and identity in borderlands is the topic of this edited collection. Using a transnational analysis of multi-layered cases from the northern Adriatic and Central Europe, the essays address fundamental questions in the history of the twentieth century. The geographical areas under scrutiny have experienced regular re-drawings of political borders, reconfigurations of state orders, and changes in ideological frameworks. The symbolic boundaries that formed the mental map of the modern world were located here: West vs East, Latin vs German vs Slavic, European vs Oriental, antifascism vs fascism, capitalism vs communism, etc. These symbolic dimensions influence the local reality, intersecting with international developments and global processes. How these changes in ideology, state and the resulting spatial politics have functioned within varying historical frameworks, and what we can learn from their changing meanings, is the main focus of this volume. Its content represents a privileged perspective on understanding ruptures as well as continuities in memory cultures, commemorative practices, situational identifications and the varying politics of the past in European borderlands.

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Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Borut Klabjan

Bordering and Memorializing the Northern Adriatic and Central Europe: Introductory Notes on Borderlands of Memory

Hannes Grandits

1 Changing Legitimations of State Borders and ‘Phantom Borders’ in the Northern Adriatic Regions

Marta Verginella

2 Slovene Mapping of Urban Centres in the Austrian Littoral in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Borut Klabjan

3 Habsburg Fantasies: Sites of Memory in Trieste/Trst/Triest from the Fin de Siècle to the Present

Vanni D’Alessio

4 Divided Legacies, Iconoclasm and Shared Cultures in Contested Rijeka/Fiume ←v | vi→

Nancy M. Wingfield

5 The Sonnenwende: From Traditional German Folk Festival to Radical Right-Wing Mobilizing Ritual along Austria’s Language Frontiers

Pieter M. Judson

6 ‘The border took him’: The Ambiguous Peoples of
‘Der Fremde Heimat’

Matic Batič

7 ‘Le Terre Redente si presentano a noi come vecchie terre italiche’: Building italianità in the Provincia di Gorizia between the Two World Wars

Klaus Tragbar and Elmar Kossel

8 Conquest through Architecture? Italy’s Strategies of Appropriation in Alto Adige and the Trentino after 1920

Gašper Mithans

9 Burnt Villages in the Julian March as Memorial Landscapes

Oto Luthar

10 Memory, Revision, Resistance: Reviving the Partisan Monuments along the Slovenian-Italian Border

Mila Orlić

11 Italians or ‘Foreigners’? The Multilayered Memories of
Istrian Refugees in Italy ←vi | vii→

Vida Rožac Darovec

12 Commemorating Anti-Fascism: Remembering TIGR in
the Northern Adriatic Borderland following
Slovenian Independence

Katia Pizzi

13 Trieste, Film and the Cold War: Sites of Memory in
the Borderlands

Notes on Contributors

Index ←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Figures

Borut Klabjan, ‘Bordering and Memorializing the
Northern Adriatic and Central Europe: Introductory Notes
on Borderlands of Memory’

Figure 0.1: Map of Central and Eastern Europe after the
First World War

Figure 0.2: Map of the northern Adriatic after the
Second World War

Borut Klabjan, ‘Habsburg Fantasies: Sites of Memory in Trieste/
Trst/Triest from the Fin de Siècle to the Present’

Figure 3.1: The statue of Leopold I in Piazza della Borsa, renamed after Costanzo Ciano during the Second World War (Slovene National and
Study Library in Trieste)

Figure 3.2: Francis Joseph as Über Franz flies over the Gulf of Trieste (authors: Luca Vergerio and Giulio Riosa)

Vanni D’Alessio, ‘Divided Legacies, Iconoclasm and Shared
Cultures in Contested Rijeka/Fiume’

Figure 4.1: The badge of the football club Kvarner/Quarnero (‘K’ stands for Kvarner and ‘Q’ for Quarnero) (Marinko Lazzarich, Kantrida bijelih snova, (Rijeka: Adamić, 2008), 53)

Figure 4.2: The Rijeka ‘single’-headed eagle on top of the city tower after one of the heads had been cut off by Legionaries of D’Annunzio in 1919
(State Archive of Rijeka, postcard collection) ←ix | x→

Figure 5.1: Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen summer solstice celebration, June 1894 (postcard from the private collection of Professor Walter Lukan, Vienna)

Figure 5.2: Deutscher Michael throwing the Czech lion, clericals, Jews, Masons, and other enemies of the German nationalists into summer solstice flames (postcard from the private collection of Professor Walter Lukan, Vienna)

Matic Batič, ‘“Le Terre Redente si presentano a noi come vecchie
terre italiche”: Building italianità in the Provincia di Gorizia
between the Two World Wars’

Figure 7.1: The village of Vrtojba near Gorizia destroyed
after the war (Regional Archive in Nova Gorica)

Figure 7.2: The new Lion of Saint Mark, constructed after
the war over the main entrance of the Gorizia castle (Regional Archive in Nova Gorica)

Klaus Tragbar and Elmar Kossel, ‘Conquest through
Architecture? Italy’s Strategies of Appropriation in
Alto Adige and the Trentino after 1920’