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History's “Illegibles”: National Indeterminacy in Istria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2012

Pamela Ballinger
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Extract

In the 1990s, the Julian (Giulian) Region that includes the cities of Trieste and Gorizia and the Istrian peninsula attracted the renewed attention of scholars for its qualities as a space in which both cosmopolitanism and nationalist polarization had flourished in the late Habsburg era. Although a healthy debate exists as to the degree to which forms of interethnic tolerance remain a feature of everyday life in these areas, most historians agree that this region underwent a series of increasing nationalizations (Italian, Slovene, Croatian, and Yugoslav) that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the partisan anti-Fascist uprising and massive demographic shifts after World War II, as the majority of Istria's “Italian” population (together with a significant number of individuals self-identifying as Slovene or Croat) migrated from the territory that passed from Italian to Yugoslav control. The historiography of the modern era in the Julian Region has thus confirmed many of the assumptions made by nationalist activists along this classic “language frontier” about the inevitability, exclusivity, and irreversibility of ethnonational identifications.

Type
Sites of Indifference to Nationhood
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 43 , April 2012 , pp. 116 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2012

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References

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12 Letter from Perassi to the Segretaria Generale (Commiss. Confini) e la Direzione Generale Affari Politici, 15 September 1947. Contained in ACS. PCM 51–54 (Certificati di Cittadinanza), b. 509, fasc. 19.17/13659 sf. 40.

13 MAE. AP 1950–57, Jugoslavia, b. 533. See the letter of 4 August 1950 titled, “Oggetto: Ammissione Scuole Slovene figli di optanti per la cittadinanza italiana.”

14 ACS. PCM 51–54. b. 509. For details, the reader is referred to the letter from the CLN of Gorizia, 24 September 1947. ACS. PCM 51–54 (Certificati di Cittadinanza), b. 509, fasc. 19.17/13659 sf. 40.

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16 Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 13.

17 In this article, I focus on recent works by Vanni D'Alessio, Egidio Ivetic, and Bjørn Thomassen in order to highlight the research of a new generation of historians and, in the case of Thomassen, anthropologists who have taken to heart the lessons of the critical scholarship on nationalism. At the same time, however, these authors do view the process of nationalization(s) as largely successful over time, with the social, economic, and political gap between clearly delineated Italian and Slav subjects widening. Even in this new critical historiography, those who proved indifferent to nation largely disappear from view.

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20 Ibid., 31.

21 On the ambitions of German activists for strengthening a German presence and identity in Trieste and Pula/Pola, see Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 105, 175.

22 D'Alessio, “Istrians, Identifications and the Habsburg Legacy,” 18. To be fair, though, D'Alessio does recognize the presence of other groups in nineteenth-century Istria (like Czechs), even though he sees them as inevitably having to come to terms with nationalization. [D'Alessio, Vanni, “From Central Europe to the Northern Adriatic: Habsburg Citizens between Italians and Croats in Istria,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13, no. 2 (2008): 237–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar]

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25 D'Alessio, “Croatian Urban Life and Political Sociability,” 133; Ivetic, “On Croatian Nation-Building in Istria,” 63–64.

26 Ivetic, “On Croatian Nation-Building in Istria,” 65.

27 Ibid., 62.

28 Folklore has a venerable history in nationalist struggles, even though imperial ethnographers like Karl Freiherr von Czoernig employed their own readings of culture and customs in service to a harmonious vision of a multiethnic empire of peoples. Folklorists have mapped distinct populations in Istria based on aspects such as traditional dress, agricultural practices and tools, and folk beliefs. These categorizations typically coincide with (albeit imperfectly) other types of ethnic and linguistic mappings. See Nikočević, Lidija, “State Culture and the Laboratory of Peoples: Istrian Ethnography during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,” Narodna umjetnost [Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore] 43, no.1 (2006): 41–57Google Scholar.

29 Yet even as astute an observer as Tomizza attributed the persistence of such indifference to nationality to the rural backwardness of the Buiese. His characters observe the exodus of Italians from coastal Istria as if from afar, believing that they belong to another world and another reality.

30 Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 5–6. Zahra also cautions, however, that bilingualism “has no intrinsic relationship to national indifference.” (Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities,” 107).

31 On issues with the Austrian and subsequent Italian and Yugoslav censuses for the region, see Perselli, Guerrino, I censimenti della popolazione dell'Istria, con Fiume e Trieste, e di alcune città della Dalmazia tra il 1850 e il 1936 (Fiume, 1993)Google Scholar and Pupo and Panjek, “Riflessioni sulle migrazioni,” 353–59.

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35 Ibid.

36 Vanni D'Alessio, “From Empire to Nation-State. Ethnic Relations in Istria from Franz Josef to Mussolini,” Paper presented at the Annual Conference for the Association for the Study of Nationalities, 2005, 7.

37 Thomassen, “The State and the Population Census,” 32.

38 D'Alessio, “Istrians, Identifications and the Habsburg Legacy,” 26.

39 Ibid.

40 Ivetic, “On Croatian Nation-Building,” 62.

41 Ibid., 70.

42 Ibid., 71. To be fair, Ivetic does admit that the full nationalization of Croats only occurred under Socialist Yugoslavia.

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45 At points in my own work, I have run the dangers of reading too far back into time the remembered experiences of “Italian” town dwellers, for whom the Slavic rural world was impenetrable and only selectively visible; this likely reflected the specific realities of the 1930s (see Ivetic, “On Croatian Nation-Building,” 39).

46 Tomizza, Fulvio, Materada, trans. Valentino, R. Scott (Evanston, 2000), 88.Google Scholar

47 Judson, Guardians of the Nation; and Zahra, Kidnapped Souls.

48 Biehl, Joâo, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton, 2007), 204–6.Google Scholar

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50 AN. AJ 43, 1040.

51 Kertzer and Arel, “Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power,” 31–35.

52 Thomassen, “The State and the Population Census,” 42.

53 Patriarca, Silvana, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-century Italy (Cambridge, 1996), 11–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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55 Volk, Esuli a Trieste, 32.

56 Pupo and Panjek, “Riflessioni sulle migrazioni,” 352.

57 Klemme, Marvin, The Inside Story of UNRRA: An Experience in Internationalism, A First Hand Report on the Displaced Person of Europe (New York, 1949), 283.Google Scholar

58 AN. AJ 43, 1038; 17 June 1947.

59 AN. AJ 43, 476.

60 AN. AJ 43, 1036; Jacobsen to Mentz; 5 November 1948.

61 Ibid., Mentz to Hallam Tuck; 5 November 1948.

62 AN. AJ 43, 140. These comments come from notes from an interview with R. L.Gesner, Chief Eligibility Officer, Italian Office, conducted by J. Mandel on 10 January 1952.

63 AN. AJ 43, 1036. Letter from M.W. Royse, Eligibility Officer, to Chief of Mission, PCIRO, Italy, 27 May 1948.

64 Ibid. See also the correspondence of 26 September 1949 for IRO interviewers in Trieste and Gorizia in which optants who “i) are of Slav ethnic origin, and ii) genuine political refugees because of persecution for political opinion (or religion) be given special consideration and declared (as a group) prima facie within the mandate of IRO.”

65 AN. AJ 43, 1036.

66 AN. AJ 43, 1038.

67 Ibid.

68 On this, see “Background Notes on Trieste and the Venezia-Giulian Situation,” 7 October 1951, AN. AJ 43, 140. The staff at the Italian mission, particularly Chief of Mission G. F. Mentz, had pushed Geneva since 1948 to include all categories of refugees from Venezia Giulia. Consult G.F. Mentz's letter to George Warren, Department of State, 16 December 1948 (AN. AJ 43, 1036).

69 Noting the unwillingness of both the Italian and Yugoslav governments to provide IRO with lists of approved options, Mayer Cohen urged Mentz to consider the Provisional Passport as “establishing a presumption first that the holder opted to retain Italian citizenship, and secondly, that the appropriate Yugoslav authority had accepted the option” (AN. AJ 43, 1036).

70 AN. AJ 43, 476. This comes from an extract from Circiut [sic] Report of Mr. Temnomeroff, Italy, April/May 1950.

71 AN. AJ 43,1039; 3 October 1949.

72 AN. AJ 43, 476.

73 AN. AJ 43, 1036.

74 AN. AJ 43, 1044.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 AN. AJ 43, 103.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 AN. AJ 43, 1036; 26 November 1948.

82 Ibid.

83 AN. AJ 43, 1036.

84 AN. AJ 43, 1036; 5 November 1948..

85 AN. AJ 43, 1036; 15 December 1948.

86 AN. AJ 43, 1036; 17 March 1949.

87 AN. AJ 43, 476.

88 Ibid.

89 AN. AJ 43, 1036.

90 On IRO's general policies against assisting emigration on economic grounds, see Wyman, Mark, DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, 1998), 70.Google Scholar

91 AN. AJ 43, 1036; 17 March 1949.

92 AN. AJ 43, 476; 25 April 1950.

93 AN. AJ 43, 476; 26 January 1950.

94 Ibid.

95 AN. AJ 43, 140; 10 January 1952. Some of the lobby groups representing the Venezia Giulian refugees to IRO likewise maintained that these groups proved morally superior to other refugee populations, particularly Slavic displaced persons from the same region.

96 AN. AJ 43, 1036.

97 Ibid.

98 AN. AJ 43, 1036; 4 April 1950.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid. IRO staff defended Plamenac(h), contending “He himself is a displaced person and therefore has a sympathetic understanding for the plight and for the needs of refugees.” Writing in his capacity as Director of the Eligibility Division, R. L. Gesner concluded that Plamenac(h) had carried out his work with integrity and without prejudice (AN. AJ 43, 1036; 29 April 1950).

102 Wyman, DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 73.

103 AN. AJ 43, 1053; 19 September 1951.

104 Wyman, DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 59.

105 AN. AJ 43, 1053; 6 August 1949. See R.L. Gesner's discussion of the screening process generally in the notes on his interview with J. Mandel, 10 January 1952, AN. AJ 43, 140.

106 AN. AJ 43, 140; 15 April 1952. A similar criticism was made of UNRRA by Marvin Klemme, who worked with DP Operations in Germany. Writing in 1949, he stated, “It is difficult to understand, however, why a Jewish refugee from a country like Poland should be welcomed into a D.P. camp, while at the same time a Slavic Pole fleeing from the same terror would be denied admittance” (Klemme, The Inside Story, 284). Though he added, “I.R.O. has, I believe, taken steps at least partially to eliminate that injustice” (ibid.), the case of Venezia Giulian refugees suggest that such dilemmas continued to plague IRO until its final days of operation.

107 AN. AJ 43, 140; 15 April 1952.

108 Ibid.

109 In a 1952 interview, Gesner maintained, “From a humanitarian point of view there is no difference between a Venezia Giulian with a provisional passport or one without.” Indeed, he added, stressing again the criterion of autochthony, “Refugees with provisional passports should be more eligible because they hold property, i.e. have always had homes in Venezia Giulia” (AN. AJ 43, 140).

110 AN. AJ 43, 476; 4 October 1950.

111 Ibid.

112 Ibid.

113 The Italian government also protested this decision, one that prompted internal debate within IRO, because many individuals in preparation for emigration had liquidated personal property and quit or turned down jobs in Italy (AN. AJ 43, 476; 10 January 1952).

114 AN. AJ 43, 303; 31 October 1950.

115 AN. AJ 43, 303; 27 January 1951.

116 AN. AJ 43, 303; 30 July 1951.

117 Ibid.

118 The IRO eligibility debates, for example, entered into the discussions about the eligibility of Venezia Giulia refugees for the United States Displaced Persons Act. On this, see AN. AP 43, 273; 43, 476.

119 Indeed, if nationalization in Istria had been achieved, how could we account for the emergence in the 1990s of a regionalist movement in Istrian Croatia that opposed the Tudjman regime's homogenizing views and that asserted that “Istrians are Istrians” (multiethnic and multilingual) who cannot declare themselves exclusively Italian or Croatian or Slovene? That said, for some former refugees from Istria, the act of displacement did produce or reinforce a hypernational identity, one that often left them unprepared for the frequently hostile reception of peninsular Italians who viewed the Istrians as “Slavs” or Fascists. For details on both topics, refer to Ballinger, Pamela, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, 2003).Google Scholar

120 Gemie, Sharif and Humbert, Laure, “Writing History in the Aftermath of ‘Relief’: Some Comments on ‘Relief in the Aftermath of War,’” Journal of Contemporary History 44 (2009): 309–18, at 313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

121 Herzfeld, Michael, “Political Optics and the Occlusion of Intimate Knowledge,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 369–76, at 373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

122 Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities,” 98.