The heritage of the Soča Front and collective memory

Abstract

This chapter explores the formation of the Slovenian collective memory of the First World War and its presentations in museums. It focuses on attitudes to the Great War which, for many years in Slovenia, were pushed to the margins of both collective memory and academic research. A characteristic of Slovenia in the period after the Second World War was that the first museum collections were created by private collectors, who gathered material remains of the war on the trail-less Soca battlefields. The formation of a collective memory was also strongly influenced by the fact that the territory on which the Soca Front had taken place, with its countless destroyed villages, military cemeteries, and material remains of war, belonged now to the Kingdom of Italy, and was under Italian military occupation. Since then, there have been numerous exhibitions in Slovenia that have focused primarily on the Soca Front.