Borderlands of memory : Adriatic and Central European perspectives

The complex intertwining of history, memory, space, place and identity in borderlands is the topic of this edited collection. Using a transnational analysis of multi-layered cases from the northern Adriatic and Central Europe, the essays address fundamental questions in the history of the twentieth century. The geographical areas under scrutiny have experienced regular re-drawings of political borders, reconfigurations of state orders, and changes in ideological frameworks. The symbolic boundaries that formed the mental map of the modern world were located here: West vs East, Latin vs German vs Slavic, European vs Oriental, antifascism vs fascism, capitalism vs communism, etc. These symbolic dimensions influence the local reality, intersecting with international developments and global processes. How these changes in ideology, state and the resulting spatial politics have functioned within varying historical frameworks, and what we can learn from their changing meanings, is the main focus of this volume. Its content represents a privileged perspective on understanding ruptures as well as continuities in memory cultures, commemorative practices, situational identifications and the varying politics of the past in European borderlands.-- List of figures -- Acknowledgments -- Bordering and Memorializing the Northern Adriatic and Central Europe: Introductory Notes on Borderlands of Memory (Borut Klabjan) 1 Changing Legitimations of State Borders and ‘Phantom Borders’ in the Northern Adriatic Regions (Hannes Grandits) 2 Slovene Mapping of Urban Centres in the Austrian Littoral in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Marta Verginella) 3 Habsburg Fantasies: Sites of Memory in Trieste/Trst/Triest from the Fin de Siècle to the Present (Borut Klabjan) 4 Divided Legacies, Iconoclasm and Shared Cultures in Contested Rijeka/Fiume (Vanni D’Alessio) 5 The Sonnenwende: From Traditional German Folk Festival to Radical Right-Wing Mobilizing Ritual along Austria’s Language Frontiers (Nancy M. Wingfield) 6 ‘The border took him’: The Ambiguous Peoples of ‘Der Fremde Heimat’ (Pieter M. Judson) 7 ‘Le Terre Redente si presentano a noi come vecchie terre italiche’: Building italianità in the Provincia di Gorizia between the Two World Wars (Matic Batič) 8 Conquest through Architecture? Italy’s Strategies of Appropriation in Alto Adige and the Trentino after 1920 (Klaus Tragbar / Elmar Kossel) 9 Burnt Villages in the Julian March as Memorial Landscapes (Gašper Mithans) 10 Memory, Revision, Resistance: Reviving the Partisan Monuments along the Slovenian-Italian Border (Oto Luthar) 11 Italians or ‘Foreigners’? The Multilayered Memories of Istrian Refugees in Italy 12 Commemorating Anti-Fascism: Remembering TIGR in the Northern Adriatic Borderland following Slovenian Independence (Vida Rožac Darovec) 13 Trieste, Film and the Cold War: Sites of Memory in the Borderlands (Katia Pizzi) -- Notes on Contributor