Chosen as Book of the Year by John Bayley, who compared the characters to those of War and Peace. New preface includes British Government expression of regret for the events described in the book. Co-author is John Corsellis.
Chosen as Book of the Year by John Bayley, who compared the characters to those of War and Peace. New preface includes British Government expression of regret for the events described in the book. Co-author is John Corsellis.
On 21st June 2013, I gave a talk in London on three books I have written about people with difficult histories. They are :
Slovenia 1945: Death And Survival After World War II
A Foot In Both Camps : A German Past For Better And For Worse
The Budapest House: Traumas Of Eastern Europe (to be published in September)
In all three countries, a catastrophic historical event continues to cause harmful divisions in societies today.
In Slovenia, it was the murder of 13,000 surrendered and disarmed Home Guard soldiers – 2% of the Slovene population – by Communist Partisans after World War II had ended.
For Germans, it was the fatal mistake of bringing Hitler to power, participating in genocide of the Jews and ravaging Europe with a World War.
For Hungarians, it was colluding in the dispatch of 500,000 of their Jewish compatriots to Auschwitz.
In all three countries, events confronted people were with finely-balanced moral dilemmas. Their choices had enormous consequences. Germany has accepted guilt and recovered, but in Eastern Europe, the resulting internal conflicts continue to hinder the harmonious development of societies.
British newspapers and politicians have been predicting the imminent demise of the euro for months, but I don’t sense panic among the people who use it in their daily lives.
Travelling on the continent over the past month, I asked a German businessman, a Spanish tourist resort manager, some Italian cultural officials and a group of Slovenian professionals whether they feared the currency they used could collapse. All replied firmly they expected no such thing. They found the question surprising.
Of course it is hard really to believe the promises printed on the banknotes of any currency. However the currency remains viable if people at least behave as if the promises were trustworthy. For that reason, I believe the euro is in no real danger.
In the globalised world, does an individual owe loyalty primarily to work place or nation? The work place is where you spend most of your time. Colleagues from all cultures and origins make a coherent whole which you identify with. But can you then still identify with your own nation, which has different values?
Modern footballers show the way. Cristiano Ronaldo plays for Real Madrid, together with other players from all over the world, but in the World Cup he joins Portugal, his home country. He identifies with a totally different group. No problem.
At the Christmas dinner of my local Slovene Association (my wife is Slovene), I met a young Slovene woman who works in Geneva for a multinational. There nobody notices she is Slovene. She is one of the team, and belongs there because of her professional qualities. The company sets her values. But at the Christmas dinner, her heart beat for Slovenia. She sat listening to folk songs and mixing with old and young people who lead quite different lives from her. Sloveneship brought them together, just for that one evening. Next Monday we were all back in our other worlds.
“Sovereignty of the Free Territory belongs to the people living in that territory.” Anodyne words these may seem, but they are loaded. The corollary is that sovereignty does NOT belong to those not living there … not any more.
The inscription is on a memorial in a fishing village on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast. The village looks Italian: it has a clock tower like St Mark’s in Venice. It WAS in fact earlier Italian. At the end of World War II Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans seized it together with the city of Trieste.
In 1954, an international treaty gave Trieste to Italy and the rest of the coast to the Yugoslavs. The same evening as the treaty was signed, the Italians from the settlements along the coast left their homes, abandoning pots cooking on stoves, and walked over to Italy as refugees.
They were scared for their lives, and for good reason. The Partisans had slaughtered thousand of Italians on the coast in 1945 before U.N. authority was established. It was a reprisal for the cruel, racist occupation of parts of Slovenia and Croatia during WWII, when Italian Fascists burned villages, shot hostages and sent thousands of young men to concentration camps where they starved and died. The Italians were afraid that withdrawal of the U.N. would lead to another bloodbath.
After 1954, tension continued to run high along a border of barbed wire and armed guards. Trieste was packed with thousands of resentful Italian emigrants. The Yugoslavs bristled with Communist militancy.
By 2004, Slovenia and Italy were both in the European Union. The concept of government by nation states had reached its limits of absurdity. Many inhabitants in the area had had 5 sets of different state identity papers without ever moving from the house where they were born. And still no real peace.
Now that both Slovenia and Italy are in the EU, people can move freely from one country to another to work, they use the same currency (the euro), and they drive through the old frontier without having to stop (Schengen).
Harmonious co-existence has broken out. A supranational organisation such as the EU may have its drawbacks, but many in the West do not give it the full credit for creating peace where before there was killing and hatred.
As everybody knows, apricots are ripe and it’s time to drop everything and swing into jam production. The goal: golden sunshine from a pot the whole year round.
I am on the Slovenian Adriatic coast, so the recipe of my wife’s aunt from Maribor is the one to use. My wife is project leader, sugarer and stirrer. I am cutter, rum-spreader and screwer.
The Maribor aunt sets a punishing regime. First find apricots which are just ripe. Ours are from the local market and are grown five kilometres down the coast. I know the spot.
Then wash, stone and cut vast numbers into just the right size of pieces for later spreading. Weigh them carefully to judge the sugar amount, add a dose of pectin, cook for ages, test the runniness to take off the stove just in time, wash the jars, sterilise them in the oven, fill them, wipe the rims, sterilise the screw caps with rum, and screw them on. Put the jars upside down in the oven for 10 minutes to complete the hermetic sealing. And wipe the sweat from the your brow.
Skip any of these steps and you risk having stringy lumps, juice all over the place and mould under the lids. Not even worth passing off to friends.
As it is, we have pots of pristine jam stretching as far as the eye can see. 10 hours work, in three shifts. Apricots are demanding task-masters.
On the internet, everbody is talking about who twitters and tweets the most. I can tell you: it’s the crazy swallows around the Slovenian Adriatic village of Izola.
Morning and evening, they swoop at phemonenal speeds among the rooftops. They fly in gangs of a dozen. And they tweet. In full throat, excitedly, loudly and non-stop for a couple of hours or so.
Sometimes a group flies straight at me on the balcony, like in one of those war films, then swoops steeply upwards a couple of metres before my face, corkscrews over the rooftops and comes round for another run.
As they approach, the sounds builds up like an approaching plane, hitting me with a huge shrill tweet as they whizz past.
Where do they get the energy to propel their tiny frames? My experience of the animal world suggests such frenetic excitement has to do with food or mating. At such speeds, I don’t see much food getting into their gullets. A few go off in couples, so I guess it is mating. The males chasing the females, showing off and boasting. The females enjoying the chase, and remaining faithful to no one.
Red hot and lusty, they are like teenage motor-cycle gangs. But more stylish and charming. Keep waking me up a 6 a.m. I love your tweeting.