History for Everyone 2/2024

Damir GLOBOČNIK

Alexander MAXWELL

Jurij PEROVŠEK

Žan GRM

Tamara SCHEER

Mateja RATEJ
SLOVENIAN CHAMPION MIHAEL HERMAN

THE NATION AS A “GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT”

“UGLY, SMALL AND DIRTY WAS THE SLOVENIAN JOURNALISM BEFORE THE WAR”

“AWAY WITH ALL THE NICOTINE, THE BOOZE, THE BEER, THE WINE!”

THEY WEREN’T ALOIS HUDAL’S GERMAN WARRIORS AFTER ALL

JADVIGA GOLEŽ – ŠPELA


Damir GLOBOČNIK
SLOVENIAN CHAMPION MIHAEL HERMAN

Lawyer and politician Michael Herman (1822-1883) was of German descent. During his service in Ptuj, he came into closer contact with Slovenians. He learned Slovenian and socialized with the local Slovenian intelligentsia. In the first elections in March 1861, he was elected to the Styrian Regional Assembly, where he began to advocate for the rights of the Slovenian population. His speech of 16 March 1863, which was translated and adapted by Fran Levstik and published in the newspaper Naprej and in two separate pamphlets, resonated among Slovenians. Herman was re-elected to the Regional Assembly in 1867, 1870, 1871 and 1878, and to the National Assembly in 1873 and 1879. In the Styrian Regional Assembly, he repeatedly advocated the equality of Slovenian with German and pointed to the demand for a United Slovenia. He advocated a federalist Austria and Catholic conservatism and was among the first to join the Law Party in 1872. In the National Assembly, his speech during the address debate in November 1873 stood out.


Alexander MAXWELL
THE NATION AS A “GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT”

Masculinity and Nationality in Nineteenth-Century Hungary
Carole Pateman’s idea of the “sexual contract” can be adapted to study the nationalist imagination. If a society defined through a sexual contract is equated to the “civic nation,” then the sexual basis of an “ethnic nation” might be called the “gentleman’s agreement.” The terms of the gentleman’s agreement, while never articulated as clearly as the sexual contract, nevertheless reveal themselves in cultural practices. Hungarians presupposed a nation consisting of ennobled men capable of seducing women to the “national brotherhood.” Hungarian ideas about the nation evolved during the nineteenth century, and Hungarian ideals of masculinity also changed: a manliness of strength increasingly gave way to a masculinity of education or refinement. While the different types of masculinity implied different attitudes toward women, they both rested on similar cultural assumptions. This article links the cultural history of Hungarian national masculinity to everyday practices, notably moustaches, cigars, and sexuality.


Jurij PEROVŠEK
“UGLY, SMALL AND DIRTY WAS THE SLOVENIAN JOURNALISM BEFORE THE WAR”

Views of Ivan Štefe and Miroslav Malovrh on their deaths in 1919 and 1922
In the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy, the ideological and political situation in Carniola was co-created, among others, by two prominent promoters of the cultural struggle at that time – the editors of the leading political newspapers, the liberal Slovenski narod and the Catholic Slovenec, Miroslav Malovrh (1861-1922) and Ivan Štefe (1875-1919). Their death was another Slovenian farewell to the Austrian era. The share of the two editors in the cultural struggle that it had initiated, first as a “Kranj quarrel” and then as a broader feature of political life in Slovenia, was more or less obviously pointed out at the time of their deaths. Their qualities as journalists and others were also highlighted, but the resentments on both sides of the »clerical«-liberal duo remained. Their newsletters did not devote a special note to the two opposing editors. But politics went on, even on the tracks laid by Malovrh and Štefe.


Žan GRM
“AWAY WITH ALL THE NICOTINE, THE BOOZE, THE BEER, THE WINE!”

The Mladi junak newsletter as part of the fight against alcohol
In this article, the author describes the anti-alcohol newsletter Mladi junak (Young Hero), which was published between 1924 and 1935. After an introduction to the state of alcoholism among Slovenian youth, he focuses on the basic presentation of the newsletter, naming the editorsin-chief and briefly introducing some of the columns published. It goes on to give examples of anti-alcohol stories, poems and riddles aimed at discouraging young readers from drinking. In the final part, some other contributions are described, which are not related to the anti-alcohol fight, but rather point young readers towards a healthy and better lifestyle, and compares Mladi junak with two anti-alcohol newsletters.


Tamara SCHEER
THEY WEREN’T ALOIS HUDAL’S GERMAN WARRIORS AFTER ALL

Tomb of 450 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war from World War I in the Church of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome
The author’s contribution deals with the identification and national origin of 450 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war who were transferred from the Roman cemetery Campo Verano in 1937 and buried in the crypt of the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome. The initiator of their reburial and the erection of the memorial chapel, Alois Hudal, in accordance with his political orientation, proclaimed them all as German warriors, even though they belonged to many other nations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.


Mateja RATEJ
JADVIGA GOLEŽ – ŠPELA

Teacher and functionary of the Maribor resistance movement
In this biographical and cultural-historical study, the author examines the life of the teacher Jadviga Golež (1911-1944), who was tragically affected by the Second World War, in the specific conditions of resistance in Maribor, on the border of cultural worlds and at the intersection of national myths. Already at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, the Maribor resident, who taught in the folk school in Šmartno ob Paki in the years before the war, was active in the resistance, and from mid-1943 until the spring of 1944 she was a central figure in the network of the teacher Dušan Špindler, then the main organiser of the Maribor resistance movement. She was a member of the District Committee of the Liberation Front (OF) and the District Committee of the Communist Party of Slovenia (KPS), and the first secretary of the city committee of the Slovenian Anti-Fascist Women’s Union. After leaving for the partisans in the spring of 1944, she became the deputy political commissar of the Lacko Battalion, and after it joined the Pohorje Detachment, she went to Pohorje herself. She continued to work as a courier in Gorenjska, then as a member of the OF district committee in Slovenske gorice. In August 1944, after being betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo and tortured in a prison cell, she committed suicide. The tragic biography of a teacher illustrates the hard and sure penetration of the female gender into the public sphere during the years of the Second World War and especially in the post-World War II era.