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Nestled in the heart of the “Old Continent”, along the border between Slovenia and the Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Slovenes in Italy form one of Europe’s national minorities. This volume presents an up-to-date overview of their efforts to preserve their cultural and linguistic heritage and distinctiveness. The Slovene national community in Italy has been affected by profound and at times devastating events, including both World Wars, the fascist period and the lengthy process of defining the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, Slovenia’s declaration of independence and the process of globalisation have provided the community with new forms of protection, but also presented it with further challenges associated with adopting its development guidelines. This book is dedicated to researchers on ethnic studies, civil rights activists and politicians dealing with minority and human rights and diversity management, as well as tourists, teachers and students.
Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities explores how, and to what extent, fascist ultranationalism elicited an anti-fascist response among ethnic minority communities in Eastern and Central Europe. The edited volume analyses how identities related to class, ethnicity, gender and political ideologies were negotiated within and between minorities through confrontations with domestic and international fascism. By developing and expanding the study of Jewish anti-fascism and resistance to other minority responses, the book opens the field of anti-fascism studies for a broader comparative approach. The volume is thematically located in Central and Eastern Europe, cutting right across the continent fro...
What is fascism in the twenty first century? What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. These images spontaneously surface in the face of the rise of radical right, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and terrorism, the last of which is often depicted as a form of "Islamic fascism." Beyond some superficial analogies, however, all these contemporary tendencies reveal many differences from historical fascism, probably greater than their affinities. Paradoxically, the fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and...
The collapse of the communist states is regarded as the starting point of the new Europe. With this turning point, historical narratives have had to be rewritten in the post-socialist countries. Focusing on the little known case of Slovenia, this issue of zeitgeschichte offers a comprehensive survey of the transformations affecting collective memory and the writing of history in one post-communist country. The essays analyze the ways in which Slovenian society has grappled with traumatic historical events and thus give insight into the ongoing struggle over the interpretation of Slovenia's past. Given the proliferating illiberal tendencies in the political culture of numerous European countries, the strategies of historical revisionism described in this issue are likely to be of considerable interest not only to scholars interested specifically in the case of Slovenia.
Focusing on the wartime activities of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Axis-controlled Yugoslavia during World War II, this book chronicles American policy, plans for sending aid and agents, and the establishment of the first training bases in North Africa and the Mediterranean. OSS missions and field operations with the Chetniks and Partisans are cataloged and analyzed for the first time, along with OSS views on Yugoslav border claims against Italy and Austria, the OSS position on Slovenia in postwar Yugoslavia, and the role of Yugoslavs cooperating within the OSS.
Until the German occupation of his native Denmark in April 1940 Anders Lassen had no interest in the War. Yet over the next five years he became a highly decorated Special Forces legend and the only non-Commonwealth recipient of the Victoria Cross. After taking part in a mutiny on board a Danish ship, he made his way to Scotland. He first joined the Special Operations Executive before serving with the Small Scale Raiding Force, Special Air Service and Special Boat Service. He took part in the daring Operation Postmaster, off West Africa, and raided the Channel Islands and the Normandy coast. He saw most action in Eastern Mediterranean, fighting in Crete, the Dodecanese, Yugoslavia, mainland Greece and finally Italy. In April 1945, now a major aged 24, he was killed at Lake Comacchio, where his gallantry earned him his posthumous VC. This superb biography is not just a worthy tribute to an outstanding soldier, but a superb account of the numerous special force operations Anders was involved in.
The Istrian Peninsula, which is made up of modern-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy suffered from the so-called "Istrian exodus" after the Second World War. This book looks at this difficult, silenced past and shifts the usual focus from migrants to those who stayed behind and to the new immigrants who came to the “emptied” towns.The research, based on individual memories, deals with silences and competing national discourses, reasons to stay and leave, hybrid border ethnic identities, and the renewal of Istrian society and its new social relations. It is a self-critical reflection on an ignored chapter of national history, which, with an empathetic approach, allows the silence to speak.
The increasing radicalization of political life in most countries in Europe lends special relevance to studies of the antifascist legacies on the continent. This insightful collection of essays is an in-depth review of antifascism in Slovenia, setting it in the context of related movements elsewhere in Europe. The period treated by the 19 essays comprises the interwar period, World War Two, and the post-war decades. The comparative and transnational perspectives advanced by the volume change our understanding of antifascism. The essays deal with the right-wing but also left-wing instrumentalization of antifascism, with a particular focus on the communist and post-communist periods. The authors point out that antifascism comes in various strains, whether inspired by liberalism, social democracy, communism, monarchism, anarchism, or even Christian conservatism. The contributors bring to light several overlooked antifascist actors, campaigns, and organisations, mostly in Slovenia and the Adriatic area.
Central to the aim of both this book is to rethink the concept of diaspora as it is used both academically and popularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It seeks to interrogate the notion of “diaspora” in an interdisciplinary way, and to explore the contradictions inherent in contemporary notions of place and identity. It presents explorations of both “traditional” diasporas, such as the Irish community in the United States and in Great Britain, as well as recently established diasporas being formed through new patterns of migration and resettlement. Traditional conceptions of diaspora focused on forced exile from the homeland and the adoption of conscious strategies of...
This book focuses on the social voids that were the result of occupation, genocide, mass killings, and population movements in Europe during and after the Second World War. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists adopt comparative perspectives on those who now lived in ‘cleansed’ borderlands. Its contributors explore local subjectivities of social change through the concept of ‘No Neighbors’ Lands’: How does it feel to wear the dress of your murdered neighbor? How does one get used to friends, colleagues, and neighbors no longer being part of everyday life? How is moral, social, and legal order reinstated after one part of the community participated in the ethnic cleansing of another? How is order restored psychologically in the wake of neighbors watching others being slaughtered by external enemies? This book sheds light on how destroyed European communities, once multi-ethnic and multi-religious, experienced postwar reconstruction, attempted to come to terms with what had happened, and negotiated remembrance. Chapter 7 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.