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Culture of the Heart
| Article
# : |
16767 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1989 |
3,711 Words |
| Author
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Edward Gobetz
Edward Gobetz is a professor of sociology and anthropology at
Kent State University, the director of the Slovenian Research
Center of America, associate editor of the International
Journal of Contemporary Sociology, and the author or editor of
fifteen books. A companion article to this piece by the same
author, "Culture of the Heart," appeared in the September 1989
issue of THE WORLD & I. |
Slovenians are a Slavic, mostly Catholic, people of less than two million souls in their native land, Slovenia, which is now the northernmost republic of Yugoslavia. Together with expatriates in Austria, Italy, and Hungary, and immigrants and their descendants in other European countries, both Americas, and Australia, they number about two and a half million.
Except at the very dawn of their history, the Slovenians have never enjoyed political independence. In the eighth century A.D., they allied themselves with their Bavarian neighbors to jointly defeat the threatening Avars, only to then find themselves under Bavarian occupation. For centuries, the Slovenians lived under Germanic rulers, including those of the Holy Roman Empire and Austria, all of whom wanted a solidly German bridge to the Adriatic and Mediterranean seas. Finally, in 1918, when Austria was defeated, the Slovenes became part of the Kingdom of the Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbians, subsequently called Yugoslavia (land of the South Slavs). In 1929, King Alexander imposed a virtual dictatorship, and after the Second World War communism became the dominant--and only--political party of the land.
In the words of Bernard Newman, the noted British writer,
It has been manifestly impossible for a small people to
gain and hold its freedom when surrounded by acquisitive
great powers, but the Slovenes [were] determined to secure
the greatest possible degree of home rule, and concentrated
on cultural rather than on political liberty. It was a
miracle of survival almost without parallel. The boundaries
of Slovenia have never been based on physical features;
they rest upon the moral strength of its people.
The Slovenian cultural tradition, as Newman points out, includes "literature of high order, with a great love of poetry." In almost every village cottage he found a "library of high quality...The Slovenes used to share with the Scandinavians the reputation of being the best-read people in the world--the number of books read per head of population was four times the British figure."
It is true that some otherwise respectable authors,
...
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