Slovenia. Occupation, Repression, Partisan Movement, Collaboration, and Civil War in Historical Research

Abstract

The author discusses recent Slovenian historiography on the Second World War, establishing that numerous high quality works were written before 1990, and before the breakup of Yugoslavia. These works, however, put the history of the liberation struggle into the foreground. In the 1980s, historians started to research several topics that had previously gone unstudied. This decade saw a process of democratization in Slovenia, and new archival materials became accessible. Scholars researching the war after 1990 can be roughly divided into three camps: those with a continued interest in the liberation movement and the partisan war; those who take an apologetic stance towards the issue of collaboration, maintaining that the war in the Slovenian lands was first of all a civil war that had been initiated by the communists; and, finally, those who have asked new questions and explored them in such a way that have put them at eye-level with European standards of scholarship.