How histories Rewrite History

Discussing the difference between History and histories, as well as how Pahor's narratives help rewrite History.

During the first week of May, a very interesting question was posed to me and my classmates by our Italian 98T teacher Nina Bjekovic during a lecture: “what is the difference between History and history?” Depending on the responder’s perspective, there may appear to be none, but many will likely note the difference in capitalization of the first letter in each word. That is where this becomes a richer question, one that addresses the tensions between majority and minority, mainstream and underground, Boris Pahor and traditional school textbooks.

Every human being, whether they attended a primary school or not, is aware of the concept of history. Many became acquainted with it in its most standardized form: History, with a capital “h.” That is, a subject taught in schools across the globe, often adjusted to address the specific past and formation of the country in which it is taught, as well as what are considered “major” global events. Many are like me and gained most of their historical knowledge from the textbooks distributed to them from primary to secondary school. These textbooks leave out certain parts of history that may reveal a nation’s dark past and tendencies, leaving its imperfections exposed. What they often do include are events that are deemed more important or relevant. For instance, the most I was taught about Black history in primary school was that Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream and Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat on a bus in Montgomery. We did not discuss Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, but rather what are deemed to be more “digestible” forms of protest and change. The other side of the coin is history, which I understand to imply a more general and straight-forward acknowledgement of events that occurred in the past within the bounds of human existence. I will refer to this as “histories” in order to acknowledge the undeniable plurality of events that have occurred throughout time. This term also implies that there are many events of which we are not fully aware, likely because of what we were taught is History.

One way to expand upon all of this is to apply it to the context from which Nina’s question sprouted: that of Trieste, and specifically that which focuses on the work of one Boris Pahor. Trieste is one of the many affected by the battle between History and histories, as “...historians always have devoted more attention to the larger states and nations in European history, the ‘big players’” (Johnson, 2011, p. 5). This Mediterranean city sits at the intersection of many cultures, languages and ethnicities, and contains multiple histories. In line with this, Joseph Cary (1993) states that “...as Silvio Benco noted in 1932, there have been three Triestes” (p. 41): each living within the hands of the Habsburg Empire, Austria-Hungary, or Italy. This makes it a city with three souls: German, Italian and Slavic. As a man born into Trieste’s Slovene minority, Pahor focuses on its Slavic component, as well as how History has tried to forget it.

As Lonnie R. Johnson (2011), author of Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, has pointed out, Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia tend to be the nations on which many histories of Eastern or East Central Europe primarily focus (p. 6). As a result of this, “...Slovenia and Croatia, small nations and newly independent states, appear primarily in their historical capacities as part of Austria and Hungary before 1918 or Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1991” (Johnson, 2011, p. 6). A similar phenomenon has occurred to the Slovene and Croat populations in Trieste, as Mussolini’s Fascist Italy attempted to strip them of their independence and deny their beauty. The Fascist regime enacted “...a politics of ‘denationalization’… whose ultimate aim was the total erasure of ‘Slav’ culture, deemed inferior and barbaric” (Knittel, 2015, p. 15). Under this regime, symbols of Slovenian and Croatian culture were attacked and burned down, such as the Narodni Dom in 1920, an event which Pahor witnessed at the age of 7.

Slovenians were also forced to assimilate and undergo additional attacks on their identity amidst the destruction of these “...Slovene and Croat cultural circles and institutions” (Knittel, 2015, p. 15). One such attack was directed towards the names of both the living and the deceased, as it was required that all Slavic names be Italianized, even on tombstones. This attempt at completely erasing any trace of Slav-ness from Trieste is in fact an example at the majority’s attempt to erase one of the existing histories, as well as its ability to be conceived as a facet of History. Pahor refuses this by chronicling yet another erasure tactic used by the Fascist regime—the prohibition of Slovenian and Croatian language in public and school settings—with his short story “The Butterfly on the Coat Rack.” In the short story, readers meet a young Slovenian schoolgirl named Julka, who is scolded by her teacher for speaking Slovenian in the classroom instead of Italian. She is then punished by being hung on a coat rack by her braids. This is ironic because the teacher is selective in his acknowledgement of “wrongdoing,” likely remaining voluntarily ignorant to the bullying and harassment Julka faces from her fellow classmates. The story highlights Fascist Italy’s presentation of the Slovene language as “ugly” and inferior to Italian, reinforced when the teacher refuses to call Julka by her name and instead yells out “Giulia!” to get her attention. Slovenes were thus stripped of their language and names during this time. This is something that the majority has chosen to exclude from History, censoring histories by not acknowledging some of the devastating events of the past.

Pahor forces both us and History to acknowledge these very events when we read his writing, doing so by focusing many of his narratives around children. Why does focusing a story on a child assist an artist in communicating their message? One answer can be found in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), a 1948 neorealist film that follows a workman and his son as they walk through Rome, searching for the father’s stolen bike. As French film critic André Bazin (1971) said, “[w]hether the child is ahead, behind, alongside… what he is doing is never without meaning” (p. 55). The meaning that Bazin is referring to is largely ethical and moral, as the son remains close to his father throughout the film and is always observing him. His stare—similar to what those of Julka’s classmates do to their teacher after she is hung on the coat rack—“...pierce[s] his every movement” (Pahor, 2008, p. 6), imploring him to rethink and be held accountable for his actions. Children have an inherent innocence and evoke the most empathy from us. When humans realize that children are the ones who will “inherit History,” as Nina Bjekovic has said, perhaps their focus becomes less individual and more collective. They may have no choice but to come to terms with the pain that certain actions inflict. This is what children-based narratives contribute to the communicating of messages like those found in “The Butterfly on the Coat Rack.”

Additionally, Pahor’s work can be thought of as written experiences that combat the censoring of histories. His novel Necropolis is one such example of a written text that does so. In the book, Pahor reflects on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Simply by presenting the experience of a Slovenian in a situation in which the conversation has largely been about the Jewish population, Pahor interjects into History with some of the largely unknown histories: those of the other concentration camps that housed political prisoners, among others. In the documentary titled The Man Who Saw Too Much (2019), he states a request he has for History: “Every year we remember victims of the past war. All I want is for this year, when Europe commemorates the dead and the suffering, in addition to the Jews, mention the other camps. We had to work in these camps, we were dying from hunger, from work” (0:04:44). With this statement, Pahor reminds viewers of the documentary that History often forgets, but that it shouldn’t. The lack of discussion around the experience of Slovenians during World War II makes me wonder how the struggles of other groups of people have been forgotten as well, such as those of Russians, Poles, Croats, and Czechs.

This is why Pahor’s work is so important: it recalls and paints a literary picture of the horrific things that film was not there to capture. That is what memoirs and literature do, they force us to become aware of different histories. They offer an alternative to thanatourism—the act of traveling to sites (like Auschwitz) associated with tragedy or death—which Pahor addresses in Necropolis, acknowledging both the sincerity and naiveté behind the actions. His work does what he states people from all over Europe aim to do when they tread the holy ground of the camps from the past: it “...pay[s] homage to the ashes of fellow creatures who by their mute presence have raised in our hearts, an immovable landmark of human history” (Pahor, 1995, p. 2).

With this quote, we shall return to the question that gave this blog post reason: what is the difference between History and histories? To me, History is that which conforms to the agenda of the majority. When I think of History, I think of school curriculums that pick and choose which “facts” to present to students. These facts often exclude the experiences of people not deemed important enough to mention, people who History has tried to strip of their dignity. But it is all important. On the other hand, histories do not necessarily have an agenda, except of course when they are uncovered by “minority” authors like Boris Pahor. That agenda aims to let them be known and understood as equally important and crucial to the human effort to not repeat them. Thus, some histories may not be known, but did in fact happened and are, as Pahor states above, “immovable” whether the majority chooses to acknowledge them or not.