David Bandelj

University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia

David.Bandelj@ung.si

 

 

The Open or Close Character of the Slovene Western Border,

Based on Three Writers: Pahor – Rebula – Kocbek

 

 

Abstract: In 1975, the Slovene writers from Italy Boris Pahor (1913) and Alojz Rebula (1924) published the book Edvard Kocbek, pričevalec našega časa (Edvard Kocbek, a Witness of Our Times). In that book, the writer and former minister of the Yugoslav government Edvard Kocbek (1904–1981), publicly denounced for the very first time the mass murder of the “domobranci” (Slovene Home Guards) at Kočevski rog, committed by the Yugoslav Communist Party. The reaction to this denouncement of the Communist Party and of its leaders was not solely political in nature; it was intended for Kocbek as much as for the two authors of the book. This article attempts to shed some light on the fate of the three authors, based on their diaries from that period. Equally, it aims to explore the closed or open character of the border between Yugoslavia and Italy, which varied greatly following the moods of the Party.

Keywords: Slovenia; Communist Regime; Edvard Kocbek; Boris Pahor; Alojz Rebula; Political Diaries; Borders.

 

 

Introduction, or Who is Edvard Kocbek?

 

The Slovene poet, writer and politician Edvard Kocbek was born in 1904. When he appeared on the literary scene in 1934 with his collection Zemlja (Earth), he immediately established himself as one of the most prominent Slovene poets, although he also wrote works of prose, among which two partisan diaries, Tovarišija (Camaraderie, 1949) and Listina (Document, 1967), the collection of short stories Strah in pogum (Fear and Bravery, 1951), but also the poetic collections Groza (Horror, 1961) and Poročilo (Report, 1969).

In 1937 he got into conflict with the Catholic culture by publishing the essay Premišljevanje o Španiji (Reflections on Spain), even though he was close to Christian ideas and the Catholic traditions, and was writing for the leading Catholic magazine Dom in Svet.

He was one of the founders and leaders of the Liberation Front of the Slovenes, and after the war, one of the leading political officials in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. He soon saw the possibility of great spiritual changes after World War II, and as the leader of his Christian group, he supported the idea of a spiritual revolution, which was on the other hand interpreted by the Communists of the Liberation Front only as a class revolution. He was one of the signers of the Dolomites’ Declaration in 1943, with which the three groups that constituted the Liberation Front (the Communists, the Christian socialists and the sokoli^[1]) left its leadership to the Communist Party.

Despite being one of the top figures of the Yugoslav political life after the war, Kocbek was constantly surveilled by the Party, and in 1952, after the scandal following the publication of the book Strah in pogum (Fear and Bravery), he was banished from public activity. He was forced into early retirement and couldn’t publish his writings for ten years.

A new scandal about his figure arose in 1975, after the publication of Edvard Kocbek, pričevalec našega časa (Edvard Kocbek, a Witness of Our Times), which is the main subject of this article.

Edvard Kocbek died in 1981, and was buried with full Party regime honours.

The figure of Edvard Kocbek has evidently provoked a laceration between Slovene intellectuals of the liberal, left-wing and Catholic circles.

However, the goal of this study is to shed light on the latest “Kocbek affair”, which particularly pierced the Slovene public, since it came from across the Slovene border and was conceived among the Slovenes in Italy. It crossed the relatively open border between Italy and Yugoslavia, and paradoxically the border became less open.

The amount of material and of research possibilities offered by this affair unfortunately can’t round up the subject in its entirety. Thus, in our argumentation, we will be forced to skip certain passages of Kocbek’s story and just summarize its main events.

During the writing of this article, a new book has appeared on the Slovene cultural scene, Edvard Kocbek, osebni dosje št. 584 (Edvard Kocbek, Personal Dossier No. 584) by Igor Omerza, which describes in a complete and encyclopedic way the happenings around the figure of Kocbek on almost 600 pages, forming thus an important and reliable collection of documents, evidence and commentaries of all three affairs concerning Kocbek.

 

The Incident

 

In March of 1975, a book was published in Trieste with the title Edvard Kocbek, pričevalec našega časa (Edvard Kocbek, a Witness of Our Times), dedicated by the Slovene writers Boris Pahor and Alojz Rebula to their colleague Edvard Kocbek in occasion of his 70th birthday. The book is made up of three parts: it starts with some contributions by Boris Pahor about the controversy following the publication of Strah in pogum (Fear and Bravery) in 1952, when Kocbek suffered the first political persecution. The second part of the book is taken up by a rather long essay by Alojz Rebula, Premišljevanje o Listini (Reflections on Document), clearly paraphrasing Kocbek’s polemical essay Premišljevanje o Španiji (Reflections on Spain), which provoked the uprising of the Slovene Catholics in 1937, which deals with Kocbek’s partisan diary Listina (Document). The third part is a long dialogue between Boris Pahor and Edvard Kocbek, in which Pahor asked his colleague writer several fundamental questions about his experiences with the Liberation Front and the fighting, and especially about Kocbek’s view of the “bela garda” (White Guard)^[2]. In this interview Edvard Kocbek spoke publicly for the very first time about the massacre of the domobranci–belogardisti at Kočevski Rog[3], which happened after the end of the war in 1945.

Kocbek’s statements in this interview completely shocked the Slovene literary and political spheres, which stepped into action literally the day after the publication of the book. Boris Pahor was forbidden to step into the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, Alojz Rebula was visited more than once by the Yugoslav secret police, while Kocbek suffered a real newspaper persecution and probably avoided prison only because he had contacts with the leading European literary personalities of the time. Even Heinrich Böll took his defence, publicly writing about the “Kocbek affair” on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and addressing directly in the text the President of the SFR of Yugoslavia Josip Broz – Tito, only to receive a rather cynical response by the president of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts Josip Vidmar[4], who wrote to Böll (and to J. Georg Reissmüller, who wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung some days before Böll about the new persecution against Kocbek…), and reproached that “you shouldn’t lecture us on humanism”.

As a “collateral” damage, the socialist regime arrested two of Kocbek’s friends, both collaborators of the magazine Zaliv: the journalist Viktor Blažič and the judge Franc Miklavčič, who published (under a pseudonym) two mild articles in Zaliv, deconstructing the regime’s persecution mounted against Kocbek. They suffered a period of 15 and 19 months of maximum security imprisonment and forced labor, and were later granted a pardon. Following Slovenia’s independence, both their sentences were pronounced null and void.

Kocbek bore the weight of the affair until the very end. Being spiritually shaken up and physically already weakened, this strong psychical pressure certainly helped to worsen his situation and led him into an early grave on November 3rd 1981.

 

Precedence

 

It has already been mentioned that before 1975 Edvard Kocbek had twice argued with the Slovene intellectuals. Firstly in 1937, when he published in the Catholic magazine Dom in svet the article Premišljevanje o Španiji (Reflections on Spain), in which he blamed the spreading of fascism and the sympathies of the official Spanish Church on Franco’s nationalists. In it Kocbek, as a Christian, presented Communism as a “lesser evil” if compared with fascism. This lucid article was soon followed by sharp polemics (Kocbek’s ideas were openly attacked also by the bishop of Ljubljana Gregorij Rožman), which were not as great as Kocbek’s thoughts, but succeeded in inducing a crisis of the magazine Dom in svet. The Chief editor resigned, the magazine lost some important correspondents and was hushed for a year, but for the very first time there was a division of ideas among the Slovene Catholics, later made obvious by the birth of a new magazine, Dejanje, which was more closely related to Kocbek’s thoughts.

The second of Kocbek’s public arguments is connected to his war experiences, when he joined the Liberation Front as a Christian Socialist, and then became one of the leading Yugoslav politicians after the war. He became “Minister for Slovenia” in Beograd, which basically meant that he had not an important role and could be at the same time under surveillance by the authorities. In his diaries from 1945 to 1952, it is evident that he was progressively aware of the advance of the Socialist dictatorship in Yugoslavia. Upon returning to Slovenia, he was often at loggerheads with the authorities and was therefore called on pleadings. A reason for his suspension was found in 1952, after the publication of his collection of short stories, Strah in pogum (Fear and Bravery), in which Kocbek was the first to deal with the Liberation Front in a less dogmatic and more artistic and philosophical way, since he posed questions about the relativity of guilt and about pluralism inside the LF. A wave of criticism and condemnations hit him, with a quite obvious intention of isolating him. The regime took the occasion (since it didn’t plan it) and suspended Kocbek ahead of his time.

 

Echoes

 

The affair following Pričevalec našega časa (A Witness of Our Times) was very important for the entire Slovene cultural scene, especially because the book was published in that part of the Slovene world that was out of Yugoslavia’s jurisdiction, by two Slovene writers from Italy.

All the three involved writers wrote about these things in their diaries, which were later published. In these we can find an authentic description of the facts, which can be also read synoptically, and show us the situation of a dissident writer suffering the terror of the regime, and at the same time present – and this is the aim of this article – the relative open or close character of the border between Italy and Slovenia, which was decided by the regime and not by socio-cultural factors.

 

Edvard Kocbek

 

Even though he was the direct subject of the affair, Edvard Kocbek quite surprisingly doesn’t provide many pieces of information and evidence in his diaries. This should be ascribed also to his old age and relative physical weakness that worsened considerably because of the Pričevalec našega časa (A Witness of Our Times) affair. It should also be pointed out that Kocbek’s diaries of the years 1975 – 1976 contain only a small number of notes, collected by Dimitrij Rupel in his book Slovenski intelektualci od vojaške do civilne družbe (Slovene Intellectuals from the Military to the Civil Society), and thus don’t provide enough first-hand material.

The most striking fact is of course Kocbek’s expectation of the “conversation” that the Office for Internal Affairs asked him to have after the publication of the book. His emotional response to such an invitation to have a conversation, which was really more an interrogation, is close to great psychic pain:

 

Tomorrow I might get crazy with their sophisticated questions. (…) But the thorn in my side hurts, it has cut deep into my flesh; what do I have in common with those persons tomorrow, I will speak to an official of the Internal Affairs, they have nothing to do with my destiny. You, Lord, help me! (Kocbek 1989: 211)

 

It is evident from the records that during that interrogation the Party accused Kocbek of false propaganda, defamation of the State and its representatives, and falsification of historical facts. In their eyes, Kocbek’s worst crime was indeed the confession of the massacre of the Home Guards’ army. It was Kocbek’s moral confession, a burden the writer wanted to get off, since it had been heavily pressing on his chest, as a human being and a Christian, ever since the end of the war. But the Party was not interested in that. A couple of days later, after listening to a radio report of a SZDL (Socialistična zveza delovnega ljudstva – Socialist Union of the Working People) meeting, Kocbek wrote:

 

In this document too they have erased with an array of words my main statement about the unjust death of thousands of Home Guards. Therefore I must write down that I have been once again brought thirsty across the water, with which I mean that they have intentionally withheld the fact that my interview was the honourable deed of a man who would like to get his fellow fighters ready to repent that act together (…). Due to their exclusivism, they feel forced to manipulate me, so long as people don’t discover their decision made in 1945, when they committed the worst act in Slovene history. (Kocbek 1989: 217)

 

Some months after the beginning of the affair (the booklet was published in March 18th 1975), Kocbek was completely isolated. There were attacks against him in the press, on public commemorations and in other media. Even the organisation of the Poetic Evenings of Poetry in Struga let him know (the record was made on June 19th) that “due to the peculiar situation, brought about by the campaign in the newspapers”, they had to withdraw their invitation to Kocbek to participate in the famous festival, to which he had already sent his contribution. The regime was creating a desert around Kocbek, who was, on the other hand, supported by his European friends; interesting is the record of his contacts with the Nobel prize winner Heinrich Böll:

 

Around nine in the evening I received an unexpected call by Böll. Zdravka was delighted to hear his reassuring voice. He had the same effect on me. (…) He said that he’d been talking about my writing impulse, with which I have communicated something authentic in the times of anti-fascism, as well as today, when some purity in the shallow and superhuman matters is so much more important. (Kocbek 1989: 233)

 

Böll was the first eminent figure that helped Kocbek not to feel completely isolated in the affair. In a personal letter, described by Kocbek in detail, it is quite evident that the Nobel prize colleague defended him by formulating a thesis on humanistic and historical grounds, stating that the authorities in 1945 were the embodiment of the absolute, of both good and evil, and that the massacre of the Home Guards was basically an operation to eliminate those that were considered fascists by the authorities.

If we forget about the high moral value of Böll’s words and focus only on his noble deed of supporting a colleague – a dissident[5], persecuted by the regime – we can notice a definite exposure of the international scene, which reached Kocbek and prevented him from going to prison. Even if the eminent writers that supported Kocbek were far away, the borders were more accessible for them than for the colleagues living in Italy.

The leaders of the secret police or the Department for State Security certainly considered Kocbek’s international recognition. In a hallucinatory dialogue with one of the officials, Kocbek summarized his words:

 

In Austria you attract groups and small groups. To them you are a victim, an idol, a future leader. The only way out for you is to renounce to all your activity and become only a Yugoslav citizen. We won’t tolerate any more adverse activity. I have enough data in my hands. We could start legal proceedings against you just because of your interview in Zaliv. Rest assured that it won’t be easy to proceed against you, as you are also a man full of merit, and a good writer. (Kocbek 1989: 236)

 

Fortunately, the Party had enough presence of mind to understand that they were not dealing with a criminal, although their proceedings against Kocbek don’t really suggest that:

 

(Kocbek) “Please, prove to me with evidence how I have recently endangered the social system, the constitution and the State, the Party and its leaders!”

(…) He simply answered: “It is not my duty to prove you anything”. (…) This is not my duty, you do it yourself and then announce it publicly. (…)

“It is written on the invitation that I have been invited to a conversation. Why are you refusing it now?”

“We don’t have to converse with you, our duty is just to warn you about your dangerous activity.” (Kocbek 1989: 236-237)

 

The State was carrying out its autocracy against Kocbek with the aid of blinded officials, who were defending with bureaucracy the entrenchment of an institution, built on a lie. This was not only visible in the peculiar nature of the relations with Kocbek, who was at that time living in central Slovenia, in the capital Ljubljana, but also (and especially) with the Slovene authors living outside the borders of Slovenia, namely with Boris Pahor and Alojz Rebula.

Kocbek’s diary ends in 1976 with a single record: for details about the affair we should turn to the diaries of his two colleague writers.

 

Boris Pahor

 

As stated in Boris Pahor’s 1974 to 1976 diary Ta ocean strašnó odprt (This Tremendously Open Ocean), the book Pričevalec našega časa stirred up the public opinion even before its publication. Its authors, Rebula and Pahor, realized that it was explosive material, it was a historical deposition by Kocbek. It was clear to Kocbek himself that those were important thoughts that would turn an important page in Slovene history. It is interesting though that the regime had a copy of the interview in its hands even before its publication, as declared by Pahor during a dialogue with Kocbek in his diary:

 

According to Edi, Tone Fajfar[6] had invited him and threatened him in the name of the authorities, saying that they would certainly attack him hard if the booklet with his answers were published. Apparently, on the table in front of Fajfar were photocopies of Edi’s text, to prove that they were well informed about just everything. (Pahor 1989: 120 – 121)

 

Even before the event, the three protagonists knew what awaited them, but Kocbek’s irrevocable decision to publish the answers and thus let the Slovene public know about the dirty deeds performed by the Communist Party inside the LF (the Dolomites’ Declaration and the massacre of the Home Guards) instilled them with the faith that they were on the right track, since the truth would finally be revealed.

Upon the release of the book, Pahor was getting ready for the struggle with the border (he was travelling from Trieste to Yugoslavia-Slovenia). Here he showed for the first time the paradoxical situation that could happen to a person living his Slovenehood on a territory with a mixture of languages and cultures, where the proximity of his mother tongue and his nation should be a comfort:

 

I’ve checked the trunk of my humble car.

There shouldn’t even be a needle in it, unless part of some necessary equipment of a careful driver.

The same is true for anything I’ll be wearing, and also for anything Živka[7] will have. We have to take out of her purse the list of groceries we bought in the self-service in Barcola. And the medical prescription. In fact, once they checked through a tube of Aspirines I had, and that with the vitamin-C pills.

We need to be immaculate tourists tomorrow, and our vehicle clean, as if it just came out of the factory.

Such is indeed the force of the booklet published today.

On the contrary, its greenish colour should symbolise hope. (Pahor 1989: 128)

 

The day after the release of the book, an amazing event really happened to Boris Pahor, which is described in detail in the book. Unfortunately, the text would be too long to quote here, but it is worth at least to summarize the events.

Pahor wanted to cross the border with his wife, but he was stopped by the Yugoslav policemen, and without prior warning or a special warrant the police examined him, his wife and the car, and then took him with his car to Sežana police station, where he was interrogated. Here, two officials from the Department for State Security[8], during their interrogation about Pahor’s cultural activities and complaints, from which it is clear that the State did not like the Home Guard massacre to be discussed in public, asked as many as three times about who the initiator of the interview was. After three affirmative answers, Pahor became suspicious and recorded:

 

“Of course”, I certified, and looked at him in an interrogative way, since I could not understand the reason for that ritual. Because it all had indeed a somehow biblical aura, even though there was a triple assent and not a triple denial. (Pahor 1989: 140)

 

At the conclusion of the hearing, the policemen deprived Boris Pahor of his “prepustnica”[9], and left a stamp in his passport, which would deny him entry into Yugoslavia for one year, and the book Witness of Our Times was banned from Yugoslavia as well.

Pahor came to terms with his fate and followed the controversy from afar, and recorded the organized newspaper campaign, in which the Ljubljana newspaper Delo, the newspaper Gospodarstvo, and the Slovene newspaper from Trieste Primorski dnevnik, deliberately attacked the trio of writers Kocbek, Pahor, Rebula, without offering specific evidence. Pahor summarized it in a simple sentence, dictated by many past controversies:

 

It is all quite simple: you mustn’t criticize a Slovene Communist, dead or alive. Amen. (Pahor, 1989: 161)

 

Oppression and thorough inspections were also experienced by the supporters of the book, published on the inside cover, and other Pahor’s colleagues, friends or benefactors:

 

A lady, whose name has been so far published in our magazine among the benefactors, asks not to be mentioned anymore, although she is going to continue to support us.

A teacher who has made a contribution for the printing of the booklet is outraged; she and her husband went across the border for shopping and for fuel, and were detained for two hours. The husband was out of his mind (…)

An acquaintance from Slovenia asks me “not to send indicted literature anymore”, meaning the magazine she’d been receiving regularly. It is quite obvious that she had received a special visit. (Pahor 1989: 171)

 

In Pahor’s diary there are many recordings in which the author mentioned the importance of the book Witness of Our Times in the development of Slovene society, and went into mental digressions, which complemented the comments about the happenings. It is also evident from his correspondence with Kocbek that for the documentation of all the events he’d been much helped by the letters he and Kocbek were exchanging at the time. It is important to notice that all the mail went through the ubiquitous secret police arm, and therefore Pahor decided that this correspondence would be used as a weapon against the system, because he knew that it was read by the secret police. He could thus communicate with the police, without them realising that the letters between Kocbek and Pahor were acting as (voluntary) documentation for an overlooking State, giving away what the writers thought about its position and its mode of operation. Several times he recorded in his diary such lines about the correspondence:

 

The answer in which I would offer some information to the snooper that is going to intercept Edi’s correspondence, something that might be worth thinking about. (Pahor 1989: 124)

 

We are going to return to Pahor’s diary later, when talking about his reflections on the border and the united Slovene cultural space, the meaning of which was shifting according to the regime’s will at the time of Kocbek’s affair.

 

Alojz Rebula

 

Rebula’s diaries probably address Kocbek’s affair more thoroughly than the other two, firstly because the author regularly published them, and the diaries from 1974 to 1981 have been available to the reader for quite some time; and secondly, because his vision of the Kocbek affair is slightly different: he was “only” the co-author of the book, and therefore the regime didn’t persecute him as it did with Pahor.

He wrote this in his diary immediately after the release of the book:

 

The green booklet has, as it seems, provoked a real state of alert on the border. The policemen are inspecting people and vehicles like crazy. (Rebula 1996: 123)

 

A few days after the regime prohibited Pahor from getting into Yugoslavia, Rebula provocatively crossed the border, to see what would the police authorities do. He, too, was taken to the police station in Sežana for a conversation, or better a three-hour questioning by the political police about the fate of their book. The excerpt, talking about it in the diary, is one of the best passages in Rebula’s writing:

 

During the three-hour interrogation, my share in making the book, my essay, are not even mentioned, although I am the co-writer of the introduction, and my essay Premišljevanje o Listini (Reflections on the Document) is 60 pages long, almost half of the book. Everything revolves around Intervju (The Interview) and the Home Guards, only Kočevski rog got on the Party’s nerves. (…)

This is how the conversation ends, we get up, and Black-haired says: “If you came to Sežana to get the same stamp Pahor got in the passport, you were mistaken.”

What else would I be looking for as the co-author of the criminal book?

But Black says: “Here are your passport and your permit, you are free to travel anywhere in Yugoslavia, including to visit your friend Kocbek.” (…)

I ask myself, puzzled: why such double standard? Because they see more political power in Pahor? Because his controversy with Kardelj[10] got on their nerves? Or because they would like to divide us?

To isolate Pahor? (Rebula 1996: 127-129)

 

The questions posed by Rebula are legitimate, but the fact that he had more conversations with the political police than Pahor shows the aim of the regime, which wanted to separate Rebula and Pahor, and even make a confidant out of one, although the police never admitted that, and Rebula consistently denied it. Malicious and frequent visits from the Department of State Security, experienced by Rebula, with discussions about culture, politics and theology, show a pathetic image of the regime, which used the police even against writers.

The submission of the leading literary spheres to the regime strongly disappointed Rebula and Pahor (and, indirectly, Kocbek). When the trio of writers could have got the support of at least their artistic comrades to help the breakthrough of the historical truth, Rebula found in the newspaper Naši razgledi a comment from the highest literary sphere:

 

Words, pronounced by Ivan Potrč on a meeting of the Communist Active in the Slovene Writers’ Association.

If I sift this prose of his through, it is quite obviously barbaric: the massacre of 10,000 Slovenes is legitimate, even after thirty years there can be no reconciliation, we shall never spit on our Communist Party… The President of the Slovene Writers’ Association has today reached such humanistic peaks (…) ( Rebula 1996: 151)

 

The servility to the regime is quite evident here, and Rebula’s reaction in the diary is a list of meetings with the political police, troubles at the border, and reactions of the press in Slovenia. His perspective, on the side of historical truth (just like Pahor’s and Kocbek’s), is imbued with sadness for living “at the border”, because crossing the border would always be psychologically painful. The diary log is full of events and chicanery on the frontier, but the following shows a different approach. At Rebula’s crossing from the Slovene to the Italian side, the militiamen wondered:

 

“How did you menage to get into Yugoslavia?” he says overlooking the open passport.

“With my passport, of course.”

“You are not allowed to come to Yugoslavia anymore,” he says and returns it to me, as if it were the last time.

“Someone above you told me differently in March: said that I could travel anywhere in Yugoslavia.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“I am not competent for this.” (Rebula 1996: 167)

 

Rebula later ascertained that it was most probably a misunderstanding, but the event still looks like psychological intimidation.

The same is true for any visit by the Department of State Security (in their diaries, both Pahor and Rebula call it by its “old” but ominous acronym UDBA), interrogating Rebula, and sometimes trying to convince him that he was on the wrong track. If the regime used terror and interdiction with Pahor, a psychological game was used with Rebula, hoping that the writer might be more willing to dialogue. Rebula himself wrote that in connection with the described event:

 

“We want you to often visit Slovenia,” said the UDBA officials in Koper.

But I am still an undesired subject for the border militia. They haven’t received any new instruction concerning me. So has been told Zora[11] by that plump policeman I had dealings with a month ago on the train.

So, as I suspected: the Udba has only enacted that misunderstanding. It is indeed a psychological massage, which is supposed to soften me up. (Rebula 1996: 174)

 

Very interesting are also the parallels drawn by a philosophically inspired Rebula between Communism, its underlying atheistic basis, and other regimes. He compared fascist and communist slogans, and found a disturbing similarity, for example when the newspapers devoted to the President of Yugoslavia Tito the 25th May issue, celebrating the Day of Youth in occasion of his birthday:

 

Ljubljana’s daily Delo in a ceremonial red outfit. TITO, TO SMO MI VSI (Tito, this is us all) stands out above the editorial, bearing the signature of Ljubo Jasnič. This must be a rather inexperienced courtier, otherwise he wouldn’t have translated with such light-hearted frivolity the fascist DUCE TU SEI TUTTI NOI – Duce, you are us all. (Rebula 2002: 36-37)

 

Generally speaking, Rebula’s diaries are much more packed with criticism of the regime than Pahor’s, but the criticism is different. Pahor attacked Communism-Marxism with action, Rebula went to its philosophical foundations and tried to destroy them in his diaries.

Both became enemies of the regime when, the one as a Christian (Rebula), the other left-winged (Pahor), but both national conscious men, tried to stand at Kocbek’s side in disclosing the historical truth about the inhumanity and limitations of Tito’s regime.

 

The Open and Closed Character of the Border

 

The legend about “the most open border in Europe”, such as should have been the border between Yugoslavia and Italy, spread in the Slovene territory in the sixties of the 20th century. It is true that through this border went daily big numbers of people, a large amount of different materials (legally or illegally), from food to cultural materials. But it is also true that the Yugoslav regime repeatedly used the border to persecute the freedom of citizens, transforming its “most openness” into a terrible psychological torture.

Of this was already aware Boris Pahor, when driving to the border the day after the publication of the book on Kocbek:

 

No, I didn’t even have such a copy (of the book, note by D.B.) with me, although it would be quite natural at “the most open border in Europe” to allow a person such a pleasure. (Pahor 1989: 129)

 

Subsequent events, already described earlier, confirm Pahor’s idea. For him, the border changed from “most open” to “hermetically sealed”, but what is really evident is the overreaction by police and customs officers at the publishing of the book.

Alojz Rebula also wrote about the first strengthened controls at the border because of the book, which extended not only to the Slovenes, but also to Italian citizens, who had nothing to do with the case:

 

Listen, Trieste: an “ustaša” campaign through Sežana is being prepared, Yugoslavia has informed the police of Trieste about it, and the Yugoslav border authorities are therefore checking the Italian citizens as well. (Rebula 1996: 130)

 

As frontier people, the two writers from Trieste were particularly interested in questioning the issues of borders, of belonging and identity. For Yugoslavia, or rather Slovenia, both the writers were considered its own, but only as long as they remained close to the regime’s ideas (though truth be told, it should be said that not Pahor nor Rebula ever confirmed their likeness of the regime), or better, until they became dangerous to the regime.

Boris Pahor’s thoughts during a personal search are quite tragic:

 

The man in civilian clothes started collecting my documents.

On top was the Pen club card.

Poor PEN, I said to myself, I carry its card with me in case an Italian official wanted something from me, and I could use the PEN club card like Bevk[12] before the war; and now the card is in the hands of people who were supposed to defend me… (Pahor 1989: 133)

 

The above event is almost grotesque, if you look at it from today’s point of view. It is this grotesqueness, however, that reveals the regime’s most faulty conduct. The duplicity with which the regime considered the two Slovene writers, members of the Slovene community in Italy, first as its own, and later considered them nothing but foreign citizens, shows the inconsistency of its political option, which showed no sympathy whatsoever for culture or truth, and tried to force them to conform to its ideology.

Pahor and Rebula experienced the terror of that system, which also used borders as a means of self-preservation, and didn’t care for any worldview nor morality, but only cared for the self-preservation of the absolute truth inside the ideology that formed the basis of this system.

The terror on the borders was also experienced by all those who had supported the publication of the book, and even by unsuspecting people who were just homonyms of the two authors. A month after the outbreak of the affair Rebula recorded:

 

The intimidation on the border continues. (Rebula 1996: 142)

 

The Department for State Security went so far as operating in an area that was not its own. The visits experienced by Alojz Rebula and some other prominent cultural figures, and even ordinary people who were “ideologically” far from the regime nomenclature, are surprising, as they could belong to the area of problematic diplomatic relations. Eavesdropping, tracking and chicanery, which also occur on the territory of the Italian Republic, once again overturn the concept, which was earlier expressed by the regime, when considering Pahor and Rebula first as its subjects, and later as hostile. The inconsistency of the Yugoslav regime is striking.

Pahor discussed this when reading an ironical article by Jože Javoršek[13] about Heinrich Böll’s intervention in Kocbek’s affair:

 

(Javoršek, note by D.B.) encourages Böll to pray for me, so that I would not “invent too many things, otherwise his passport will not be renewed and he will never again be able to enter our socialist homeland, which he kicks with both feet (sic), but at the same time he can’t live without.”

It is interesting to note that “his passport will not be renewed”, as if it were talking about a Yugoslav citizen, which proves that the authorities across the border consider us their subjects when we are being inspected by them, but otherwise we are just foreigners. Zaliv, for example, is published abroad. (Pahor 1989: 193)

 

After all that has been recorded in the writers’ diaries, readers can form quite an objective opinion on the Yugoslav system, which has been undermined from within by Rebula and Pahor, with some help from Kocbek, when they revealed to the public two fundamental truths:

 

1) in the context of the Liberation Front, which was pluralistic, the Communists pushed for a revolution and, after signing the Dolomites’ Declaration, commenced its implementation;

2) after the war, the Slovene Home Guards experienced unjust fate, when they were returned to Yugoslavia by the English, where they were inhumanely liquidated without possibility of appeal.

The reaction of the regime, absolutely excessive, gives the impression that the writers hit the regime right where it was most vulnerable, the very core of its construction, which was based on a historical lie.

On the other hand, the regime’s psychological terror along the border reveals a very peculiar way of governance, essentially not very different from other dictatorial systems in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Its painful struggle to conceal the truth leads to the other extreme, namely to the loss of a true consciousness of democracy.

This also happened on a cultural level, and both writers offered us a glimpse of reality as seen through the eyes of the people they were meeting:

“The newest issue of Zaliv,” I show the magazine on the table to a visitor from Ljubljana. “You can take it if you want.”

But she doesn’t take it, although she used to come to Trieste to get Zaliv.

The regime has terrorized people to this extent. (Rebula 2002: 190)

 

The psychological condition alongside the “most open border in Europe” was most eloquently recorded again by Alojz Rebula, when describing in his diary his feelings four years after Kocbek’s affair, in 1981, when spending some days in Slovenia:

 

These four days I spent in Slovenia were “normal”. Had no dealings with the authorities nor with the police.

And yet, when returning, I feel finally relieved in Sežana, when the train axis below me starts turning. (Rebula 2002: 377)

 

The regime thus displayed a rough psychological war, done by “opening and closing the border”, which continued not only for some years after the affair, but also after Kocbek’s death.

The rectitude expressed by Boris Pahor at the regime’s plots is worth mentioning. Despite the end of the restrictions to enter Yugoslavia, the writer – after learning about the arrest of his colleagues at Zaliv, Miklavčič and Blažič – decided not to cross the border until his friends were freed.

 

The moves made by the writers Kocbek, Pahor and Rebula, which have only been suggested in this article, are undoubtedly directly responsible for the fact that the Yugoslav regime, as well as many others, was destined to fail. But to get to that it was necessary to wait for Kardelj’s and Tito’s deaths in the eighties, for the unsuccessful reorganisation of Yugoslavia, and for the general insurrection in Eastern Europe in the nineties.

Nonetheless, we can easily affirm that Kocbek’s affair started undermining the Yugoslav system where it was most vulnerable: in its relation to history and truth.

The attitude towards the writers, towards the openness and closure of the borders, discussed in this article, was just one of the most acute examples of the wretched spiritual state in Yugoslavia and consequently in Slovenia in the seventies.

 

 

Bibliography

Dović, Marijan (2007): Slovenski pisatelj. Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU.

Kocbek, Edvard (1989): Dnevnik 1975–1976. Rupel, Dimitrij: Slovenski intelektualci. Od vojaške do civilne družbe. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga.

Kocbek, Edvard (1984): Peščena ura. Pisma Borisu Pahorju. Ljubljana: Slovenska matica.

Omerza, Igor (2010): Edvard Kocbek, osebni dosje št. 584. Ljubljana: Karantanija

Pahor, Boris; Rebula, Alojz (1975): Edvard Kocbek, pričevalec našega časa. Trst: Kosovelova knjižnica.

Pahor, Boris (1989): Ta ocean strašnó odprt. Dnevniški zapisi 1974–1976. Ljubljana: Slovenska matica.

Rebula, Alojz (1996): Previsna leta. Dnevnik 1974–197 –1976. Trst: Mladika.

Rebula, Alojz (2002): Iz partiture življenja. Dnevnik 1977–1981. Trst: Mladika

 

 

Notes