Talking Past Each Other: Language and Post-World War II Killings in Slovenia

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the initial weeks after the end of World War II, Josip Broz Tito’s new communist Yugoslav regime summarily executed perhaps 70,000–100,000 (the figures are estimates and disputed) Yugoslav Axis collaborators and opponents of the regime. Public discussion of the killings was taboo in communist Yugoslavia for over three decades. Only in the 1980s, with the loosening of the state’s monopoly on the narrative of World War II, were the killings tentatively and reluctantly acknowledged by the regime in Slovenia. Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the independence of its constituent republics accelerated this process, and gave way to fierce public debate and polemic, which shows little sign of waning, over the narrative and memory of Slovenia’s World War II experience and the postwar killings. Yet missing has been an analysis of the limitations of the language employed in describing and debating the postwar killings, where the use of a single word can betray the assumed ideological convictions of its speaker. “Talking Past Each Other” first offers a historical survey of how the postwar killings have been spoken of (or not) since 1945, navigating the highly divisive contemporary memory politics and memorial landscape in Slovenia. It then examines the ongoing language war over the postwar killings by analysing how suitable some of the more common terms are in describing the killings, including “massacre,” “terror,” “revolutionary violence,” “vengeance/settling of accounts,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.” It finally offers some tentative suggestions for less controversial terminology that may form the basis for a more historically reflective and less divisive discussion.