RUTAR, Sabine. Beyond The Balkans PDF

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Studies on South East Europe Studies on South East Europe
Beyond the Balkans offers new perspectives on Southeast European history, Sabine Rutar (Ed.)
envisaging the region’s history as an integral part of European and global hi-
story. Debates about the mental map of “the Balkans” as the negative alter ego
of the “the West” (Maria Todorova) and about the construction of the Balkans
as a historical space sui generis (Holm Sundhaussen) provide points of depar-
ture. The essays treat an exemplary, yet broad set of topics designed to open
Beyond the Balkans
up idle fields of research. They foster common and coherent methodological
lines and establish a new agenda for future research. Towards an Inclusive History of
Sabine Rutar is Senior Research Associate at the Institute for East and South- Southeastern Europe
Sabine Rutar (Ed.)

east European Studies, Regensburg.
Beyond the Balkans
978-3-643-10658-2
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Studies on South East Europe
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Beyond the Balkans

Towards an Inclusive History
of Southeastern Europe
edited by
Sabine Rutar
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To the memory of Klaus Tenfelde (1944 – 2011)
He was many things, but no Southeast Europeanist.

Yet, without his intellectual curiosity and generous support
this project would never have gotten off the ground.
Editing work on this volume was generously supported by

the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg.
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Drawing by Y. Hakan Erdem (Istanbul), Bochum, January 2007
Layout and typesetting: Jelena Jojević
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Contents
Sabine Rutar
Introduction: Beyond the Balkans 7
Part I
Space and Temporality, Entanglement and Transfer
John Breuilly
Nationalism and the Balkans: A Global Perspective 29
Diana Mishkova
On the Space-Time Constitution of Southeastern Europe 47
Guido Franzinetti
Irish and Eastern European Questions 67
Vangelis Kechriotis
Requiem for the Empire: “Elective Affinities” Between the
Balkan States and the Ottoman Empire in the Long 19th Century 97
Augusta Dimou
Towards a Social and Cultural History of Cooperative
Associations in Interwar Bulgaria 123
Wim van Meurs
The Burden of Universal Suffrage and Parliamentary
Democracy in (Southeastern) Europe 161
Helke Stadtland
Sakralisierte Nation und säkularisierte Religion:
Beispiele aus dem Westen und Norden Europas 181
Katrin Boeckh
Perspektiven einer Religions- und Kirchengeschichte
des südöstlichen Europas: Netze über Raum und Zeit 199
Part II
Approaching Agency
Y. Hakan Erdem
Turks as Soldiers in Mahmud II’s Army: Turning the
Evlad-ı Fatihan into Regulars in the Ottoman Balkans 227
Stefano Petrungaro
Fire and Honour. On the Comparability of Popular
Protests in late 19th Century Croatia-Slavonia 247
Borut Klabjan
Puzzling (Out) Citizenship and Nationality: Czechs in
Trieste before and after the First World War 265
Vesna Drapac
Catholic Resistance and Collaboration in the Second
World War: From Master Narrative to Practical Application 279
Sabine Rutar
Towards a Southeast European History of Labour:
Examples from Yugoslavia 323
Part III
Creating Meaning
Stefan Rohdewald
Nationale Identitäten durch Kyrill und Method:
Diskurse, Praktiken und Akteure ihrer Verehrung
unter den Südslawen bis 1945 357
Stefan Ihrig
“Why Them and Not Us?” The Kreuzzeitung,
the German Far Right, and the Turkish War of
Independence, 1919-1923 377
Amaia Lamikiz Jauregiondo
Maintaining Alternative Memories under an
Authoritarian Regime: Basque Cultural Associations
in the 1960s and Early 1970s 405
Falk Pingel
Begegnungen mit einem Kulturkampf.
Notizen zur internationalen Bildungsintervention
in Bosnien und Herzegowina 423
Vanni D’Alessio
Divided and Contested Cities in Modern European History.
The Example of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina 447
Contributors 477
Index 483
Sabine Rutar
Towards a Southeast European History of Labour:

Examples from Yugoslavia
Klaus Tenfelde wrote in 2005 that a “glaring discrepancy” existed “between the
political role assignments of the ‘working classes’ in the socialist planned econ-
omies (and more broadly in the real-existing state socialist countries) and the
knowledge about their social-historical dimensions”.1 While this remains
largely true today,2 the “social-historical dimensions” of labour represent a con-
siderable research gap also in our understanding of preceding eras. The follow-
ing essay is a reflection on how we might include the history of southeast Euro-
pean work in the 20th century into recent tropes of global labour history. I take
Yugoslavia as a case in point and advocate an in-depth, empirical examination
of the diversity of practices and the imaginaries mobilized by their protagonists.
I also illustrate the interdependence between historical actors and the social
structures that they created and that conditioned their motivations for action.
The historical actors central to my argument are not primarily those workers
conditioned by a political function or motivation.3
Southeast European societies were predominantly agrarian during much of
the 20th century. They were characterized both by a weak social structure and a
1 Klaus TENFELDE, Arbeiter, Arbeiterbewegungen und Staat im Europa des “kurzen” 20. Jahr-
hunderts, in: Peter HÜBNER et al. (eds.), Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus. Ideologischer An-
spruch und soziale Wirklichkeit, Köln et al. 2005, 17-34, 17. I thank Natali Stegmann and
Joachim von Puttkamer for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
2 Paradigmatically, cf. Christoph KLEßMANN’S comprehensive study Arbeiter im “Arbeiter-
staat” DDR: deutsche Traditionen, sowjetisches Modell, westdeutsches Magnetfeld (1945-
1971), Bonn 2007. Cf. the historiographic overview on how the Czech and Slovak Republics,
Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany have contributed to worker’s history un-
der communist rule after 1989 in Peter HEUMOS, Workers under Communist Rule: Research
in the Former Socialist Countries of Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe and in the
Federal Republic of Germany, in: International Review of Social History 55 (2010), no. 1, 83-
115.
3 Research on Russian/Soviet processes of industrialization and urbanization proves very in-
spiring, both as a blueprint for the argument put forth here and as an important comparative
backdrop for southeast Europan contexts. Cf. e. g. Mark D. STEINBERG, Moral Communities:
The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907, Berkeley/Ca.
1992; and the overview by Andrei SOKOLOV, The Drama of the Russian Working Class and
New Perspectives for Labour History in Russia, in: Jan LUCASSEN (ed.), Global Labour Histo-
ry. A State of the Art, Bern 2006, 397-454.
324 Towards a Southeast European History of Labour
problem-stricken national structure said to be “unique in Europe”.4 Anyone who

researches southeast European labour needs to consider the strongly hegemonic
treatment of the legacy of the Second World War during state socialism. These
historiographic threads continue to have a forceful effect. Much research today
continues to react to the restrictions and omissions fostered by socialist histori-
ography and thus functions in an overtly relational manner. In the case of Titoist
Yugoslavia when it comes to the Second World War, Reinhart Koselleck’s
statement is very valid that “numerous primary experiences were […] sup-
pressed or enforced in the various spaces of consciousness, or they were put into
new contexts, which could not easily be transferred back to the primary experi-
ence”.5 The following examples from Yugoslavia illustrate key questions to be
pursued in the search for the life worlds of labour. They are not intended as a
pars pro toto for wider southeastern Europe, but rather they are meant to func-
tion as an incentive for a widening of perspectives. The underlying intention is
to always link, entangle and compare southeastern Europe with broader Euro-
pean and global contexts.
Labour history, after substantially falling out of fashion, has gone global and
has gained renewed attention in recent years. Global labour history, conceived
at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam at the end of the
1980s as a response to the crisis of labour and social history, has grown over the
past decade to involve scholars from a broad range of countries all over the
world.6 Several fundamental features have marked this renewed history of work,
4 Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Okkupation, Kollaboration und Widerstand in den Ländern Jugoslawi-

ens 1941-1945, in: Werner RÖHR (ed.), Okkupation und Kollaboration (1938-45). Beiträge zu
Konzepten und Praxis der Kollaboration in der deutschen Okkupationspolitik, Boppard 1994,
349-365, 355 [emphasis in the original].
5 Reinhart KOSELLECK, Erinnerungsschleusen und Erfahrungsschichten. Der Einfluß der beiden
Weltkriege auf das soziale Bewußtsein, in: Id., Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Frank-
furt/M. 2000, 265-286, 275.
6 Cf. Lex HEERMA VAN VOSS, Whither Labour History? Histories of Labour: National and In-
ternational Perspectives, in: International Review of Social History 58 (2013), no. 1, 1-10.
How very few scholars studying southeast European matters (and overall east European ones,
too) have participated in this proves a browse through the journals “International Review of
Social History”, “Labour History Review”, “International Labour and Working-Class Histo-
ry”, “Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung”, “Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte”, “Sozialgeschichte Online”, as well as the newly-established “Workers of
the World. International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflict”. Cf., however, the Call for
Papers issued in a joint effort by the Labour Network of the European Social Science and His-
tory Conference (ESSHC), the Research Initiative on “Labor History for the 21st Century in a
Global Perspective,” located at Central European University Budapest, and the Russian and
East European desk of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, signalling
the wish for an enlargement of perspectives to east and southeast European matters. Call for
Papers: "Bringing Eastern Europe into European and Global Labor History Panels for the Eu-
ropean Social Science and History Conference (ESSHC), Vienna 2014, available at
<http://www.ceu.hu/node/35304>, accessed 8 May, 2013. If not indicated otherwise, all inter-
net sources were accessed on 28 February, 2013.
Sabine Rutar 325
each of which would greatly benefit the study of southeastern Europe. The field
of labour history has stretched beyond institutional and top-down histories. La-
bour relations and conditions, individual and collective identities, and conflicts
involving all kinds of (male and female) workers are now taken into account.
The chronology of labour history has been expanded beyond the temporal di-
vide of the (western European) first Industrial Revolution. It has been extended
at least far enough to include the origins of merchant capitalism. Global labour
history refuses Eurocentric perspectives as well as approaches that take the na-
tion state as their exclusive point of reference. In order to address interconnec-
tions, exchanges and fluctuations between different places, methodological tools
like histoire croisée, microhistory, the history of everyday life, concepts of
translocality, and approaches that follow production and consumption chains
have been utilized.7
This has resulted first of all in a semantic clarification of the key concepts –
not the least of which is the concept of work itself – as they were used and as
they are currently being used in varying sociocultural contexts. Unfree and free
labour is a key issue, and it has become clear that normative concepts are not a
particularly valuable means of approaching work relationships. Work ethics and
work-related normative and value systems are culturally conditioned and de-
pendent on their context. Coercion, compensation and commitment have been
formulated as a guiding conceptual triad. The codification of professions and
the connected dynamics of social mobility have been studied in a comparative
framework;8 the coerced and voluntary geographical mobility of the working
poor are another focus, as are aspects of the sociology of religion and of gender
studies. And finally, the study of collective organisation and action has been
renewed under globally defined auspices. Ad hoc forms of labour resistance,
practiced mostly by unfree workers, are included here. Certain forms of resis-
tance – including arson, strikes, and sabotage – occurred in all types of labour
relationships and were not exclusive to politically organised labour collectives.
7 Marcel VAN DER LINDEN / Jan LUCASSEN, Prolegomena for a Global Labour History, Amster-
dam 1999, available at <http://www.iisg.nl/publications/prolegom.pdf>; Jan LUCASSEN (ed.),
Global Labour History; Marcel VAN DER LINDEN, Workers of the World. Essays Toward a
Global Labour History, Leiden 2008; Christian G. DE VITO (ed.), Global Labour History. La
storia del lavoro al tempo della “globalizzazione”, Verona 2012. In this vein, plurifold pro-
jects are under way, e. g. the Berlin-based International Research Center “Work and Human
Lifecycle in Global History” (http://rework.hu-berlin.de), the “Società italiana di storia del
lavoro”, established in October 2012 (http://storialavoro.wordpress.com); the International
Scholars’ Network “History of Societies and Socialisms” (http://www.h-net.org/~socialisms/),
and the Bremen-based Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (www.stiftung-
sozialgeschichte.de).
8 Cf. the database “History of Work Information System” based at the International Institute of
Social History in Amsterdam, available at <http://historyofwork.iisg.nl/>. As of yet, no east
European country or language is part of this database, nor is any non-European country.
Global labour history strives to overcome both western Eurocentrism and the
nation state framework. These objectives are not self-evident. After all, orga-
nized workers’ movements functioned within nation state contexts and were a
genuinely European experience. Virtually all concepts associated with the clas-
sical workers’ movements originated in western Europe. In order to overcome
this bottlenecked perspective, global labour history uses a very broad concept
of “work”, which includes wage labour, forms of unfree labour, unpaid labour,
rank-and-file workers, direct action, alternative and industrial unionism, labour
law, social justice, and labour in both industrial and agrarian contexts. In fact,
global labour history strives for a comprehensive, yet flexible typology of la-
bour relations, for a historical sociology of work.9 Southeast (and east Euro-
pean) types of labour ought to become a much more substantial part of it.
In nuce, the new labour history has been broadened to include a vast array of
human activities without however neglecting “classical” issues. Where there is
power, there is resistance. Such resistance has always contained within it a quest
or a yearning for a more just world. It aspires towards social security, social jus-
tice, and dignity – which accounts for its acute relevance. At a time of global
economic crisis, scholarship has returned to themes of class, inequality and po-
litical economy with renewed interest, urgency, and moral purpose. The search
for labour movements’ contributions to social and cultural progress and the de-
velopment of society as a whole stands out among the many relevant facets of
this broadened approach. Value systems and value transfer comprise another in-
teresting realm of research. Solidarity, whether within a given workers’ collec-
tive, between workers and the society in which they act, or on the international
level, is a particularly poignant example of such a value system. These fields of
research profit from a tension between studies of the normative and ideal sides
of things on the one hand, and studies of social practice on the other. The social
welfare state, social rights, and huge increase in access to education are among
the most important achievements in this regard. Trade Unionism, practices of
self-management, and civil society practices are the other side of this coin.
Strikes, on the other hand, help to define the border between the acceptable and
the inacceptable. Another field of tension consists of moral economies, work
ethics, and the requirements of performance in the framework of conflicts and
solutions to conflicts, regardless of the type of society in which such negotiatory
processes take place. The moment the state takes over issues that were origi-
nally formulated by workers, these issues become instruments not only of coop-
eration, integration, and welfare, but also of societal control, as well as of
mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion. At the other end of this spectrum
9 David MAYER / Berthold UNFRIED, Marcel van der Linden und die International Conference
of Labour and Social History / ITH, in: Sozial.Geschichte Online 9 (2012), 15-20, 16f., avail-
able at <http://duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-31954
/04_Mayer_Unfried_ITH.pdf>.
Sabine Rutar 327
are findings that help to make the history of dependent and of unfree labour
more comprehensive. Such results go beyond and “beneath” the history of the
political – and beyond the normative. They do so by focusing on the agency of
the underprivileged and/or coerced.10
The general predominance of political history, the enduring lack of attention
to historical social agency, and the ideologized over-saturation of the history of
the “working class” in state socialist times largely account for the lacunae in the
historiography of southeastern Europe. After the end of state socialism, any-
thing but a focus on the overfed topic of the ideologized “heroes of (industrial)
work” seemed important, who, after all, were hardly even numerically repre-
sentative of the southeast European societies. Hence, the history of this social
group is overstudied from a certain angle, and thoroughly understudied from
many others. In any case, the oversaturation of ideologized narratives has con-
signed the issue to oblivion rather than inciting the sort of re-writing of history
that has happened in other realms. This revisionism has fostered the new or re-
newed nation state frameworks of the post-socialist states, a process which in
turn credits studies that adhere to this framework above all else.11
State socialist politics of history cannot be blamed for everything, however.
The social history and the history of work of the (late) Habsburg and Ottoman
Empires is also characterized by gaps. This is especially true of comparative
empirical studies focused on its peripheries, be they intra-Empire or elsewhere
in Europe. The historiographic dominance of the nation state framework ac-
counts for the lack of comprehensive narratives of social and societal history
that go beyond and renew the history of the political.12 Our knowledge of south-
10 Karl Heinz ROTH, Ein Enzyklopädist des kritischen Denkens: Marcel van der Linden, der he-
terodoxe Marxismus und die Global Labour History, in: Sozial.Geschichte Online 9 (2012),
116-244, at <http://www.stiftung-sozialgeschichte.de>.
11 Ulf BRUNNBAUER, Ein neuer weißer Fleck? Der Realsozialismus in der aktuellen Geschichts-
schreibung in Südosteuropa, in: Id. / Stefan TROEBST (eds.), Zwischen Amnesie und Nostal-
gie. Die Erinnerung an den Kommunismus in Südosteuropa, Köln et al. 2007, 87-111. What
Brunnbauer affirmed in 2007 has seen amendments in recent years. For Yugoslavia, cf. the
Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism established at the end of 2012 at the
University of Pula, Croatia; as well as the emerging research field of cultural history of social-
ism, see Hannes GRANDITS / Karin TAYLOR (eds.), Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side. A History of
Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s), Budapest / New York 2010; Breda LUTHAR / Maruša
PUŠNIK (eds.), Remembering Utopia. The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia,
Washington/DC 2010; and the two volumes by Igor DUDA, U potrazi za blagostanjem: o
povijesti dokolice i potrošaþkog društva u Hrvatskoj 1950-ih i 1960-ih, Zagreb 2005; Id.,
Pronaÿeno blagostanje: svakodnevni život i potroškaþka kultura u Hrvatskoj 1970-ih i 1980-
ih, Zagreb 2010. Cf. also Daniela KOLEVA (ed.), Negotiating Normality. Everyday Lives in
Socialist Institutions, New Brunswick 2012.
12 Cf. the comprehensive ninth volume of the monumental series “Die Habsburgermonarchie
1848-1918”, dedicated to “social structures” and firmly committed to “classical” social histo-
ry. Methodologically, it is hardly innovative, bypassing many open questions that could have
incited further research. Helmut RUMPLER / Peter URBANITSCH (eds.), Die Habsburgermonar-
east European processes of labour modernisation and the social relationships

that underpinned them would benefit greatly if studying them were more closely
informed by approaches from social and cultural history. In this case, a new and
more comprehensive field of research that transcends nation state borders could
be established. Such a field would require scholars to combine macro- and mi-
cro-historical approaches, structures and agencies.13 Studying patterns of com-
munication within a social group and/or between them precisely includes issues
like solidarity, competition, and cooperation on the one hand, and issues like
power, market mechanisms, and social hierarchies on the other. That which Alf
Lüdtke has termed Eigen-Sinn would be a useful concept for approaching
southeast European protagonists of labour.14 Eigen-Sinn refers to “the contem-
poraneity of possibilities for action: participation, consent, avoidance, retreat,
coping, solidarity, allowance, dissociation, refusing aid, resistance”.15 In any
multiethnic setting – including southeastern Europe – the question remains cen-
tral if and how ethnonational patterns of affiliation and solidarity have inter-
sected social ones. The chance to produce a “matter-of-fact historical analysis of
patterns of work, production relations, ways of life, identity constructions […]
of important social groups in modern society, which however have to be re-
chie 1848-1918, vol. 9: Soziale Strukturen, Wien 2010. Austromarxist ideas have recently
seen a certain revival, cf. Ernst HANISCH, Der große Illusionist: Otto Bauer (1881-1938),
Wien et al. 2011; Pavlina AMON / Stephan-Immanuel TEICHGRÄBER (eds.), Otto Bauer: Zur
Aktualität des Austromarxismus, Frankfurt/M. 2010. The Italian section of the Austrian So-
cial Democratic Party has been studied by Marina CATTARUZZA, Sozialisten an der Adria.
Plurinationale Arbeiterbewegung in der Habsburgermonarchie, Berlin 2011 (Ital. orig. 1998).
For the Ottoman Empire cf. E. Attila AYETKIN, Peasant Protest in the Late Ottoman Empire:
Moral Economy, Revolt, and the Tanzimat Reforms, in: International Review of Social Histo-
ry 57 (2012), no. 2, 191-227.
13 For the Adriatic periphery of the Habsburg Empire cf. Sabine RUTAR, Kultur – Nation – Mi-
lieu. Sozialdemokratie in Triest vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Essen 2004.
14 Alf LÜDTKE, Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis
in den Faschismus, Hamburg 1993. Cf. Id., Einleitung: Herrschaft als soziale Praxis, in: Id.
(ed.), Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozialanthropologische Studien, Göttin-
gen 1991, 9-63; Thomas LINDENBERGER, Die Diktatur der Grenzen. Zur Einleitung, in: Id.
(ed.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur. Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der
DDR, Köln et al. 1999, 13-44, esp. 21-26, on “authority as social practice” and the methodo-
logical functions of the concept of Eigen-Sinn. See also Thomas WELSKOPP, Der Betrieb als
soziales Handlungsfeld. Neuere Forschungsansätze in der Industrie- und Arbeitergeschichte,
in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), no. 1, 117-141.
15 Belinda DAVIS / Thomas LINDENBERGER / Michael WILDT, Einleitung, in: Id. (eds.), Alltag,
Erfahrung, Eigensinn. Historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen, Frankfurt/M. 2008, 11-28,
17.
Sabine Rutar 329
garded more strongly as an integral part of this society”,16 has rarely been seized
for southeastern Europe.17
Anyone studying the social history of labour in Yugoslavia engages with a
country not only of ethnonational and cultural disparities, but also of huge so-
cio-economic ones.18 Yugoslavia offers a treasure trove for what Reinhart
Koselleck has called the contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous, i.e. the
existence of “temporal layers of differing endurance and differing origins,
which exist and take effect contemporaneously”.19 The ways in which socialist
ideas were introduced to the predominantly agrarian societies of Serbia, Bul-
garia, and Greece have thoroughly been studied. Intellectuals who went abroad
to study and brought socialist thought back home have been the focal point of
this research.20 These intellectuals attempted to implement their newly acquired
ideas through processes of amalgamation and adaptation. However, how and
when such ideas reached the minds of the labourers, be they peasants or indus-
trial workers, remains largely unstudied. Almost ironically, the same is true for
the development of political workers’ movements, despite the huge, but thor-
oughly selective literature on the topic. In the same way that nationalism studies
have left unanswered many aspects of how “peasants turned into Serbs, Bulgari-
ans, [and] Croats”,21 it remains to be seen in detail how peasants turned into in-
dustrial and, possibly, class conscious or even politically active workers.
The European process towards mass society, the expansion of political par-
ticipation, as well as the emergence of the “age of nationalism” prior to the First
World War affected southeastern Europe as well. Democratization processes
there, however, did not happen parallel to industrialization and urbanization in
the same way. Instead, these processes acquired distinct features and included
16 Thomas WELSKOPP, Arbeitergeschichte im Jahr 2000. Bilanz und Perspektiven, in: Traverse.
Zeitschrift für Geschichte 7 (2000), 15-30, 16.
17 Cf. the contributions to Fikret ADANIR (ed.), Social Movements in Southeast Europe. Reas-
sessment of Historiography and Perspectives for Future Research, Bochum 2005.
18 For a concise overview cf. Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten.
Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des Gewöhnlichen, Wien u. a. 2012, 159-167.
19 Reinhart KOSELLECK, Einleitung, in: Id., Zeitschichten, 9-18, 9. The concept goes back to
Ernst BLOCH, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt/M. 1962, 104 and passim.
20 Augusta DIMOU, Entangled Paths Towards Modernity. Contextualizing Socialism and Nation-
alism in the Balkans, Budapest / New York 2009.
21 Maria TODOROVA, The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of
Eastern European Nationalism, in: Slavic Review 64 (2005), no. 1, 140-164, 154, with refer-
ence to Eugen WEBER, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-
1914, Stanford 1976. Lately, Stefano Petrungaro has very convincingly demonstrated the so-
cial distance existing between the peasant “mass” and the political elites in fin de siècle Croa-
tia-Slavonia. The former showed a still rudimentary interest in the ethnic factor(s) of politics
and one firmly connected to their own social distress; the latter semantically constructed an
imaginary of a peasant collective that in reality was much more diversified. Stefano
PETRUNGARO, Pietre e fucili. La protesta sociale nelle campagne croate di fine Ottocento,
Roma 2009 (Croatian transl. 2011). Cf. Petrungaro’s contribution to this volume.
social patterns unknown to western Europe, like the enlarged family (zadruga),
a traditional key feature of Slavic agrarian-dominated societies, and the endur-
ance of feudal-like social relations. The persistent and pointed contrast between
urban and rural life worlds accentuated patterns of social distance, as did the
various configurations of peasant urbanites and the region’s general economic
weakness.22 Western research on industrialization processes has paid almost no
attention to the history of industrialization in southeastern Europe. A compara-
tive social history of this European region, let alone one that incorporates the
region into a broader perspective, has hardly even been initiated.23
Peasants into Workers: the Interwar Period
Close to twenty years have passed since Marie-Janine Calic’s “Social history of
Serbia, 1815-1941. The detained progress of industrialization” was published.24
She found that “in many historiographic overviews the history of industrializa-
tion focuses on the continental powers, and even in pertinent handbooks the
Balkan lands have been treated only in recent times”.25 Hers is a meticulous re-
construction of the Serbian path to modernization and towards an industrialized
society, and she sees her empirical findings as a pars pro toto for the socio-
economic history of southeastern Europe.26 Her pioneering endeavor did not
open up a largely fallow field of research, however. If later scholars pondered
Yugoslav social history, they focused almost exclusively on the – predominant
– agrarian context.27
22 Andrei SIMIû, The Peasant Urbanites. A Study of Rural-Urban Mobility in Serbia, New York
et al. 1973. Touching on the topic from a Russian/Soviet perspective Mark D. STEINBERG,
Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925, Ithaca 2002;
as well as several of the contributions to Donald FILTZER (ed.), A Dream Deferred: New Stud-
ies in Russian and Soviet Labour History, Bern et al. 2009.
23 The reference here is to Hartmut KAEBLE, Sozialgeschichte Europas: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart,
München 2007, which still represents the state of the art with regard to a comprehensive com-
parative social history of western Europe.
24 Marie-Janine CALIC, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens 1815-1941. Der aufhaltsame Fortschritt wäh-
rend der Industrialisierung, München 1994.
25 Ibid., 13. She refers to Wolfgang HÖPKEN / Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Jugoslawien von 1914 bis
zur Gegenwart, in: Wolfram FISCHER et al. (eds.), Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sozialge-
schichte vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart 1987 (Handbuch der europäi-
schen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 6), 847-915; and Alice TEICHOVA, East-Central and
South-East Europe, 1919-1939, in: Peter MATHIAS / Sidney POLLARD (eds.), The Cambridge
Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, vol. 8: The Industrial
Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, Cambridge 1989, 887-983.
26 CALIC, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens, 14.
27 An exception is Jovica LUKOVIû, whose PhD thesis “From Peasants to Labourers? Social Dif-
ferentiation as Acculturation of a Transitional Class in Yugoslavia, 1918-1941” is under way.
Studies focusing on the peasants and/or on the dichotomy between city and village dwellers
Sabine Rutar 331
The interwar period was not least a period of reconstruction after the devas-
tating consequences of the Balkan Wars and the First World War. Serbia, for
example, had to cope not only with the loss of more than a quarter of its popu-
lation, but also with the destruction of numerous factories, mines, bridges, and
railway connections.28 Restoration was carried out on a geographically enlarged
basis within the new Yugoslav state. Still, Serbia’s economic production, and its
industrial production in particular, did not return to prewar levels until the end
of the 1920s. The 1930s were characterized by Milan Stojadinoviü’s “New Eco-
nomic Policy”, which was aimed at establishing industrial autarchy.29 Neverthe-
less, the Yugoslav economy remained heavily dependent on export rates and
foreign capital.30
Beginning in 1906, for example, the French company Mines de Bor led the
extraction of copper ore at Bor in eastern Serbia. This was one of Europe’s larg-
est copper mines, and the French firm invested considerably in the site, and not
least it invested know-how. With the foundation of the Yugoslav state in 1918,
the social structure of the mine’s skilled workforce changed, as they were now
being recruited from across Yugoslavia and also becoming more international.
Engineers and skilled personnel came to Bor from the Slovene, Croat, Bosnian,
Herzegovinian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian parts of the new country, as well
as from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Romania, Italy, and France. At the same
are Id., “Es ist nicht gerecht, für eine Reform aufkommen zu müssen, die gegen einen selbst
gerichtet ist.” Die Agrarreform und das bäuerliche Selbstverständnis der Deutschen im jugo-
slawischen Banat 1918-1941. Ein Problemaufriss, in: Walter ENGEL (ed.), Kulturraum Banat:
deutsche Kultur in einer europäischen Vielvölkerregion, Essen 2007, 141-166; Id., Sozialis-
mus als bäuerliche Zukunft. Ideologische Grundlagen des linken Agrarismus in Jugoslawien
in der Zwischenkriegszeit, in: Dietmar MÜLLER / Angela HARRE (eds.), Transforming Rural
Societies. Agrarian Property and Agrarianism in East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Cen-
turies, Innsbruck u. a. 2011, 114-148 (and other contributions in this volume); Edin MUTA-
PýIû, Agrarna reforma u BiH i njeno zakonodavstvo (1918.-1941.), Gradaþac 2007. The
dichotomies and the relations between agrarian and urban settings are an issue in Hannes
GRANDITS / Karl KASER, Birnbaum der Tränen: lebensgeschichtliche Erzählungen aus dem al-
ten Jugoslawien, Wien et al. 2003; and in Aleksandar JAKIR, Dalmatien zwischen den Welt-
kriegen. Agrarische und urbane Lebenswelt und das Scheitern der jugoslawischen Integration,
München 1999.
28 CALIC, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens, 216f., mentions 28% or, in absolute numbers, 1,247,435
persons who were victims of the First World War. At the Versailles peace negotiations, the
delegation of the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes declared that 50% of
the ore mines in Serbia had been destroyed as well as 100% of the coal mines.
29 Ibid., 404-421.
30 See the concise overview in Thomas DAVID, Yougoslavie: Nationalisme économique et
différences régionales (1918-1939), in: Id., Nationalisme économique et industrialization.
L’expérience des pays de l’Est (1789-1939), Geneva 2009, 187-197; Dragan ALEKSIû,
Medjunarodni privredni položaj Jugoslavije pred drugi svetski rat, in: Latinka PEROVIû et al.
(eds.), Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima XX. veka, Beograd 1994, 123-132, 126f. and
131.
time, the mine served as a new place of employment for the surplus of agrarian
workers in eastern Serbia. Many peasants worked in the mine, supplementing
their work in the fields. The peasants’ relationship with the mine was ambigu-
ous, however. Though it brought them work, it also destroyed nearby farmland
through its emissions and water pollution. In 1935, some 4,000 peasants re-
volted against the mine’s French owners, obtaining a small monetary compensa-
tion as a result.31 The persistence of peasant-workers and the dichotomy be-
tween these unskilled, local workers and the engineers and skilled workers re-
cruited from across Yugoslavia and even abroad indicates a glaring lack of
qualified local personnel. The region, though dominated by the mining industry
(which gave rise to several other smaller industries), was otherwise starkly
agrarian. Writing the history of labour at the Bor copper mine during the inter-
war period means writing a history of a single huge industry established in
agrarian surroundings at the outset of the 20th century. Bor was not even ac-
corded the status of a town until 1947, when it had grown to 11,000 inhabi-
tants.32 During the Second World War, the copper mine was an important object
of the German war economy, enforcing destructive practices of exploitation.33 It
was only after the war that Titoist Yugoslavia, due to its massive industrializa-
tion spurt, had a chance to foster the transformation of unskilled peasant-
workers into a more qualified industrial workforce and pay more than lip-
service to its symbolically important “heroes of work”. The fact that the com-
pany archive is well preserved and accessible at the Bor branch of the Historical
Archive of Negotin means that a comprehensive, agency-centered history of la-
bour in the mine could be written.34
Comparing the situation in Bor with that in the coalfields of Trbovlje (Trifail
in German), located at the northern rim of the country in what today is Slovenia,
shall serve to illustrate the north-south socio-economic discrepancy that charac-
terized Yugoslavia from the beginning. Lignite had been extracted in southern
Styria since 1804 and was of crucial importance in the industrialization of upper
Styria – with Graz as its centre – as well as for the locomotives of the Vienna-
Trieste railway line, completed in 1850. In 1873, the Wiener Bankverein
founded the Trifailer Kohlenförderungsgesellschaft with the help of French
capital. In the newly founded Yugoslav state, the mining society prevailed and
moved its headquarters from Vienna to Ljubljana. Infrastructural and techno-
logical modernization was financed primarily through German war reparations
31 CALIC, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens, 246-258, 296-307.

32 Cf. Bor, Serbia, Wikipedia, at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bor,_Serbia>.
33 Sabine RUTAR, Arbeit und Überleben in Serbien: Das Kupfererzbergwerk Bor im Zweiten
Weltkrieg, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 (2005), no. 1, 101-134.
34 I have worked in this archive on the years of German occupation of the mine (1941-1944).
However, this only accounts for a small part of the available materials. For some illustration
of the agency-centered potential of these sources cf. the section on the Second World War be-
low.
Sabine Rutar 333
payments. As in Bor, therefore, the capital came from abroad; after 1918, it
helped fostering considerable continuities from the Habsburg times. A crucial
difference to Bor had to do with the workforce: Engineers and skilled personnel
originated mostly from the region, rather than being imported. The interwar pe-
riod was scarcely long enough to provide for a full generation of workers
trained in Yugoslav institutions rather than in the previous, imperial ones. Older
mining engineers had studied in Austrian Leoben or in Czech PĜibram, while
younger ones had earned their degrees at the new university in Ljubljana,
founded in 1919. In terms of their social status if not of their actual living con-
ditions, however, the unskilled workers did resemble their colleagues in Bor.
Even at Trbovlje, a class of industrial labourers who did not participate in sub-
sistence agricultural production had not yet been created. The Slovene-inhabited
areas had not been among the most prosperous in the Habsburg Monarchy. Still,
a significant difference did exist between Trbovlje and Bor, hinting at different
“stages” in the process of industrialization. In Serbia, peasants lent their work-
force to the mine; in Slovenia, the miners were industrial workers who contin-
ued to practice subsistence farming.35
Yet another type of difference between the workforces in Bor and Trbovlje
needs to be noted. While communist historiography transformed all miners into
“heroes of work” and pioneering communists,36 only in Trbovlje had such a
politicization actually taken place already during the interwar period. The min-
ers there had fought a continuous sociopolitical battle against the central gov-
ernment in Belgrade, which never implemented its promises of better pay and
social security measures. Three of the founding members of the Slovene Com-
munist Party were from Trbovlje. Shortly after the party’s founding in April
1919, its members went on strike and occupied the municipal building, the post
office, the police station, and the railway station. They declared a “Trbovlje
Commune”, which was violently crushed by military intervention after three
days.37 In 1921, the Communist Party won the municipal elections in Trbovlje,
35 Sabine RUTAR, Zwischen Volkstumspolitik und Volksbefreiungskampf. Braunkohlenabbau

im deutsch besetzten Slowenien, in: Klaus TENFELDE / Hans-Christoph SEIDEL (eds.),
Zwangsarbeit im Bergwerk. Der Arbeitseinsatz im Kohlenbergbau des Deutschen Reiches
und der besetzten Gebiete im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg, vol. 1, Essen 2005, 537-569. The
“contemporaneity of the uncontemporary” implicit in this brief comparison between northern
and southeastern Yugoslavia corresponds to what Peter Heumos affirms in his aforemen-
tioned overview when it comes to the structual differences between state socialist Czechoslo-
vakia, Poland and Hungary on the one hand, and Romania and Bulgaria on the other, cf.
HEUMOS, Workers under Communist Rule, passim.
36 Sabine RUTAR, Heldentum, Verrat und Arbeit in Jugoslawien: Arbeitseinsatz im sozialisti-
schen Kontext, in: Hans-Christoph SEIDEL / Klaus TENFELDE (eds.), Zwangsarbeit im Europa
des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bewältigung und vergleichende Aspekte, Essen 2007, 75-101.
37 This happened in the framework of local protests in several parts of the country, especially
among miners and railway workers, culminating in a miners’ strike in Bosnia in December
1920, which became the final trigger for prohibiting the Communist Party who had called for
and the first communist mayor in Slovenia was a miner. Anti-communist coun-
ter organisations, in particular the paramilitary “Organisation of Yugoslav Na-
tionalists” (ORJUNA), tried to stop the strike movement. On June 1, 1924, the
opposing groups clashed violently in Trbovlje once again, and communist histo-
riography has referred to the five slain miners as the “first victims in the fight
against fascism”.38
Re-vitalizing this field of research would mean nothing less than finally start-
ing to study Yugoslavia from its beginnings rather than its end. The nearly ex-
clusive focus on explaining the country’s violent dissolution has been fruitful,
but it has also blocked many potential means of understanding Yugoslavia,
which a recent exhibition at the Muzej istorije Jugoslavije in Belgrade, organ-
ised by participants from all post-Yugoslav countries except Kosovo, called
“one of the most exciting and most controversial state-building experiments of
the 20th century” (“jednog od najzanimljivijih i najkontroverznijih državotvornih
eksperimenata u XX veku”).39 I am convinced that broadening our knowledge of
social and societal history would lead towards a more balanced understanding
of the Yugoslav experience.40 As becomes clear from the above example, much
remains to be gained from broadening empirical research into Yugoslav indus-
trialization processes, both within Yugoslavia and in comparison to processes
elsewhere in Europe and the world.
Work for the Enemy: Labour at War
Between 2000 and 2005, Klaus Tenfelde led a research project at the Institute
for Social Movements in Bochum entitled “Forced Labour in German Mining
Industries”. The project focused on both world wars, but especially the second
one. It has brought forth substantial knowledge of labour relations characterized
by occupation, exploitation, deportation, force, violence, and war in the Ruhr
the general strike. Cf. BoĠo MADTAR (ed.), Generalni štrajk rudara Bosne i Hercegovine i
husinska buna 1920., Tuzla 1984.
38 Cf. the autobiographic account of one of the protagonists Pavel BALOH, Po poteh revolucije:
spomini na predvojno revolucionarno delo v Trbovljah in narodnoosvobodilni boj 1941-1945,
Ljubljana 1966. The interwar events constitute the prologue also to the detailed study, written
in an orthodox Marxist-partisan hero’s rhetoric, on the liberation movement in the first year of
German occupation of the Trbovlje coalfields. Lojze POŽUN, Trbovlje v NOB: 1941-42,
Trbovlje 1986.
39 Jugoslavija: od poþetka do kraja, Muzej istorije Jugoslavije, Belgrade, 1 December, 2012 - 3
March, 2013, at <http://mij.rs/poseta/izlozbe/66/jugoslavija-od-pocetka-do-kraja.html>.
40 Cf. Holm Sundhaussen’s congenial questionnaire on the still puzzling issues, many of which
reach out to problems of a more general nature – statehood and mechanisms of violence, for
example. SUNDHAUSSEN, Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten, 24-27.
Sabine Rutar 335
valley, eastern Germany, northern France and Belgium, as well as Upper Sile-
sia, the Ukrainian Donbas, and Yugoslavia.41
This initiative was one of the first projects to focus on labour deployment in
the German-occupied territories of Europe rather than within the German Reich.
The project has not incited much further research, and the results of the Bochum
project have remained little more than inspiring fragments in a still underre-
42
searched field. Much of what follows in this section is a plea for a societal his-
tory of the Second World War in southeastern Europe. The focus here, too, is on
the industrial workers who after the war became a heroic pillar of the state so-
cialist modernization project. Precisely because of the way that they were sub-
sequently instrumentalized, little is known about their war experience.
When investigating the conditioning structures underlying social conscious-
ness during wartime, one must distinguish between more general human en-
deavors and “functions exclusively conditioned by the war”. Of particular rele-
vance for the Second World War was, according to Reinhart Koselleck, the ex-
perience of forced labour and of being a partisan as a special form of loyalty.43
Again, what is at stake here is plumbing the depths of the existing options for
action; this time the study is of a society shaped by existential and radical pa-
rameters: death and survival, resistance and collaboration. The applicability and
possible refinements of Lüdtke’s concept of Eigen-Sinn are part and parcel of
recent research, both with regard to individual behaviour and as a pattern. This
conceptual approach certainly would prove useful also for dismantling the
black-and-white schemes still pervading the historiography, like victim versus
41 Cf. e.g. Tanja PENTER, Kohle für Stalin und Hitler. Arbeiten und Leben im Donbass 1929 bis
1953, Essen 2010; Hans-Christoph SEIDEL, Der Ruhrbergbau im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Zechen,
Bergarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Essen 2010. On the whole, eight volumes have been published
in the framework of the series “Forced Labour in Mining Industries during the First and Se-
cond World Wars”, cf. <http://www.isb.rub.de/publikationen/reihe_c/index.html.de>.
42 In December 2012, the conference “Work under National Socialism”, organized by Michael
Wildt and Marc Buggeln at the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in
Global History” at the Humboldt University Berlin showed to what extent research continues
to be focused on circumstances within the German “Reich”, cf. the conference report at
<http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=4669>. Just published is Sanela
Hodzic / Christian Schölzel, Zwangsarbeit und der Unabhängige Staat Kroatien 1941-1945,
Berlin et al. 2013 (Studien zur Geschichte, Kultur und Gesellschaft Südosteuropas 11). Cf.
however Florian DIERL / Zoran JANJETOVIû / Karsten LINNE, Pflicht, Zwang und Gewalt. Ar-
beitsverwaltungen und Arbeitskräftepolitik im deutsch besetzten Polen und Serbien 1939-
1944, Essen 2013; Zoran JANJETOVIû, “U skladu sa nastalom potrebom…”. Prinudni rad u
okupiranoj Srbiji 1941-1944, Belgrade 2012; the overviews in Karsten LINNE / Florian DIERL
(eds.), Arbeitskräfte als Kriegsbeute: Der Fall Ost-und Südosteuropa 1939-1945, Berlin 2011;
and the catalogue to a Zagreb exhibition, Christian SCHÖLZEL, Prisilni rad i Nezavisna Država
Hrvatska 1941-1945, Zagreb 2007. A recent study set in an eastern European context is Til-
man PLATH, Zwischen Schonung und Menschenjagden. Arbeitseinsatzpolitik in den balti-
schen Generalbezirken des Reichskommissariats Ostland 1941-1944, Essen 2012.
43 KOSELLECK, Erinnerungsschleusen und Erfahrungsschichten, 270.
perpetrator and resistance fighter versus collaborator.44 The history of the Sec-
ond World War in Titoist Yugoslavia – and its variants in most state socialist
historiographies – was totally dominated by the rhetoric of the partisan war
against the occupier and the collaborationist forces. While every town and al-
most every village saw its history of partisan resistance written in great detail,
no genuine and multi-faceted interest in social actors was allowed – everybody
was politicized.45
What remains to be studied is the history of the majority of the population at
war. In fact, only a minority acted out of overtly political motivation. For the
majority of mineworkers, to stay with this category, working for the enemy
meant not least a hope of survival. In Serbia, for example, the modus vivendi be-
tween the occupying forces and the occupied population assumed a special dy-
namic. It was conditioned by both the radicality with which the occupiers oper-
ated and also the multilayeredness of the relations among occupiers, collabora-
tionist forces, and the various resistance groups. The larger part of the popula-
tion, after the first shock, opted neither for collaboration nor open resistance.46
The copper mine in Bor, by far the most important object in Yugoslavia for
the German war economy, is an apt illustration of this dynamic.47 The miners
were exempted from military service and granted the privilege of special provi-
sions. Yugoslav troops, however, had thoroughly destroyed the facility during
the German attack. The extraction of copper, therefore, could begin only after
extensive repairs were completed. These were carried out by the Serbian collab-
44 For an interesting and valid critique of Lüdtke’s works cf. Vesna Drapac’s contribution to this
volume. Cf. ibid. for an excellent deconstruction of resistance-vs.-collaboration narrative
tropes.
45 Between 1945 and 1965 over 30,000 monographs, collective volumes, and articles were pub-
lished in Yugoslavia that dealt with the war of national liberation and the socialist revolution,
a number that probably tripled by the end of the 1980s, cf. SUNDHAUSSEN, Geschichte
Serbiens, 19.-21. Jahrhundert, Wien et al. 2007, 348. In the year of Tito’s death (1980), 125
books on the Second World War were published in Yugoslavia. 46 were regional histories of
the communist-led liberation movement, 26 were reconstructions of local partisan wars, and
13 were local hero stories. Predrag J. MARKOVIû et al., Developments in Serbian Historio-
graphy since 1989, in: Ulf BRUNNBAUER (ed.), (Re-)Writing History – Historiography in
Southeast Europe after Socialism, Münster 2004, 277-316, 280f. Cf. Stefano PETRUNGARO,
Socialismi, jugoslavismi, nazionalismi. Sulle storiografie in Jugoslavia (1945-1990), in: Lo-
renzo BERTUCCELLI / Mila ORLIû (eds.), Una storia balcanica. Fascismo, comunismo e
nazionalismo nella Jugoslavia del Novecento, Verona 2008, 152-173.
46 Cf. Karl-Heinz SCHLARP, Wirtschaft und Besatzung in Serbien 1941-44. Ein Beitrag zur
nationalsozialistischen Wirtschaftspolitik in Südosteuropa, Stuttgart 1986, 205: “‘Life with
the enemy’ […] for a large part of the occupied population became ‘labour for the enemy’.”
For an overview on Serbia during the Second World War see SUNDHAUSSEN, Geschichte
Serbiens, 306-339.
47 Cf. RUTAR, Arbeit und Überleben in Serbien, for a more detailed account of what follows in
this section.
Sabine Rutar 337
orationist regime, and funded by proceeds derived from confiscated Jewish

property. Mining finally resumed in October 1941, at a rate half that of 1939.
Workers in Bor were recruited on the basis of directives obliging first Ser-
bia’s Jewish population and later the rest of the Serbian population to work in
the mines. The Serbian government of Milan Nediü initiated a considerable
propaganda effort that was intended to convince the Serbs of the usefulness of
working for the occupier. At the end of 1941, obligatory labour service was in-
troduced for all citizens between 17 and 45 years of age. The local labour of-
fices were responsible for recruitment. The methods included promises of priv-
ileged treatment as well as massive threats, forced recruitment, confiscations of
personal documents, nightly arrests, fake interrogations, and arbitrary work as-
signments also for those who were in reality far too sick to carry out hard work.
Such forced recruitment practices were applied jointly by the German military
and the Serbian police.48
The majority of the unqualified peasant-workers “simply” continued to work
in the mine once it came under German occupation. For them, it does not seem
to have made much difference who the “bosses” were. While the sources vary
greatly with regard to the numbers of additional workers transported to Bor, it is
quite clear that by February 1943 there was a huge lack of workers. A good part
of the skilled personnel, which originated from all parts of Yugoslavia and from
abroad, had abandoned their work upon the attack on Yugoslavia. They proved
difficult to replace. In the course of the war, as the situation deteriorated, par-
ticularly because of the effects of the dialectic between occupiers and the vari-
ous sociopolitical groups active in Serbia, the workers increasingly refused to
work and abandoned their workplaces. This led to ever more drastic measures
on the part of the occupiers. In increasing numbers, Russian prisoners of war
were brought in, Serbs who had emigrated from Albanian-inhabited regions,
Greeks, Poles, and – after the capitulation of Italy in September 1943 – Italian
military internees, as well as about 6,000 “labour Jews” from Hungary.49
A very valuable source with regards to the working conditions in Bor are the
testimonies recorded by the postwar “Commission for the investigation of war
crimes of the occupiers and their collaborators”. The individuals interviewed by
this commission testified of the horrifying working conditions and vividly de-
48 Cf. the in-depth study by Zoran JANJETOVIû, “U skladu sa nastalom potrebom ...”: prinudni
rad u okupiranoj Srbiji 1941 - 1944., Beograd 2012. A lengthy summarizing excerpt appeared
in German language, cf. Id., Arbeitskräfterekrutierung und Zwangsarbeit im Militärverwal-
tungsgebiet Serbien 1941-1944, in: DIERL / JANJETOVIû / LINNE (eds.), Pflicht, Zwang und
Gewalt, 317-424.
49 On the whole, about 1,200 Italian military internees worked in Serbia’s ore mines, cf. Bun-
desarchiv Koblenz (ed.), Die Okkupationspolitik des deutschen Faschismus in Jugoslawien,
Griechenland, Albanien, Italien und Ungarn (1941-45), Berlin 1992, doc. 294: Aus dem La-
gebericht von Generalmajor Erwin Braumüller, Chef des Wehrwirtschaftsstabs Südost, für Ju-
li 1944 über die wirtschaftliche Ausbeutung Serbiens.
scribed life and death, violence and despair inherent in the experience of labour
in Bor during the war. Yet, these testimonies, which were given in front of a
communist-led commission, reflect the field of tension between truth and ideo-
logical requirements. Almost all of those interviewed were characterized as ac-
tivists or at least sympathizers of the national liberation movement. In any case,
it was clearly in their interest to tell the commission what it wanted to hear. This
included the unequivocal denunciation of all non-communist Serbs as collabora-
tors. Despite the ideologized bias inherent in this source, it is very valuable as a
description of the diversity of actions – and of motivations for action – carried
out by the interviewees, clearly defying the validity of any dichotomy aiming to
categorize resistance fighters and collaborators in a clear-cut manner.
A woman’s testimony before the commission that her brother had followed
the call of the labour office “voluntarily” in February 1943 only because he had
to take care of his 17-year-old-son, for example, seems like an excuse or a pre-
cautionary defense against a potential reproach of collaboration.50 There were
attempts to rebel against the working conditions in the mine by appealing for-
mally to workers’ rights. For example, workers complained to both the German
and the Serbian labour deployment organizers because of the bad food. They
also refused to work on an important Serbian holiday. The complaint about the
food was met with complete disinterest on the part of the employers. The refusal
to work on the holiday was met with beatings, anti-Serbian offenses and the
threat of being sent to one of Bor’s detention camps on charges of attempted
sabotage.51 Many of the sources reveal the workers’ habit of working only “as
much as was necessary”. This was not necessarily a politically motivated atti-
tude. Instead, it might just as well have been simply the archaic attitude of the
servant towards his master, a way in which the peasants had always come to
terms with their lack of rights.52 The fact that many workers left their workplace
upon the occupation of the mine and continued to leave over the course of the
war was not always politically motivated, either. Such behaviour could “sim-
ply” occur out of disorientation and fear of death, especially in places like Bor
that had been destroyed. The behaviour could also be due to anger about prom-
ises that had not been kept, especially when the labour deployment lasted much
longer than anticipated. On many occasions, the workers were simply attempt-
ing to evade further beatings, mistreatments, and torture.53 The war situation
50 Arhiv Jugoslavije (AJ), Državna komisija za utvrdjivanje zloþina okupatora i njihovih

pomagaþa (DK), k. 599, fasc. 649, 15 July, 1945.
51 AJ, DK, k. 599, fasc. 649, 6 June, 1945. Testimonies by Milan Buþan and by Rastislav
Ognjanoviü.
52 AJ, Fond 103: Emigrantska vlada Kraljevine Jugoslavije (EV), k. 5, fasc. 56, 31 May, 1943,
Opšte stanje u Srbiji krajem aprila 1943. godine – Ekonomsko stanje.
53 The possibility of a conscious decision not to work for the occupier also has to be taken into
account, of course. Cf. AJ, EV, k. 5, fasc. 54, Le travail, without date, yet prior to December
1941.
Sabine Rutar 339
clearly limited their options for action – well beyond the reigning violence, arbi-
trariness and threats. Though strikes and walkouts had been a part of labourers’
lives in the interwar period, the workers who had previously worked in the mine
and who were not forced labourers in the narrow sense did not consider this
form of confrontation during the occupation.54
An obvious political act of resistance occurred when partisans infiltrated the
mine in order to gather information and incite the workers to rebellion.55 More
difficult to interpret is a testimony about a Chetnik group’s infiltration of the
barracks of one of the camps. The Chetniks attempted to convince the workers
to fight in the name of the Yugoslav king and took a dozen workers with them.
The interviewee’s testimony made it unclear whether the workers went of their
own free will or were forced to go. He then added that he himself, along with
several other workers, had taken advantage of the confusion and succeeded in
escaping the mine, thus carefully separating his own action from that of the
Chetniks. Again, the extent to which lip service to the communist investigative
commission was involved remains unclear.56 On the whole, partisan activity
was rather low in the heavily guarded copper mine. The partisans concentrated
on the coal mines, as cutting off the coal supply was a very effective means of
preventing the exploitation of other industries, including other mining indus-
tries.57 A former forced labourer in Bor, who I had the chance to interview in
Belgrade, said that the partisans in eastern Serbia were in fact stronger than the
Chetniks. He also described the whole region as being characterized by sponta-
neous rebellions rather than organized resistance – at least in comparison to
Bosnia or Slovenia.58
Even in the final phase of the war, it remains difficult to clearly separate acts
of resistance from acts of collaboration. On the one hand, in February 1943 it
proved impossible for the occupiers to make up the lack of workers through re-
cruitments in Serbia itself. People evaded whenever they could. This, among
other things, led to the deployment of Hungarian “labour Jews” to Bor and in-
54 Interview with Karlo ýerge, Belgrade, February 2003.

55 AJ, DK, k. 744, fasc. 799, 14 March, 1946, Razni dokazni materijali. The documents describe
the case of a worker who had come to Bor at the end of 1943 and was arrested in June 1944
after he had been found in possession of illegal materials.
56 AJ, DK, k. 599, fasc. 649, 6 June, 1945, testimony of Milan Buþan.
57 According to a resolution of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia concerning the situation in
Bor, about a dozen workers fled the unbearable labour and living conditions each day. Only
few of them joined the partisans, however. Rezolucija i partijske konferencije za Timok i
Krajinu, održane meseca juna 1943., in: Istoþna Srbija u ratu i revoluciji 1941-1945 (zbornik
dokumenata), vol. 1, Zajeþar 1981, 289-321, 294.
58 Interview with Karlo ýerge, Belgrade, February 2003. He called eastern Serbia “a traditional
territory of hajduci”, i. e. of outlaws and robber bands. Cf. Roland SCHÖNFELD, Deutsche
Rohstoffsicherungspolitik in Jugoslawien 1934-1944, in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte
24 (1976), no. 3, 215-258, 251, who writes that Bor “was spared from partisan attacks and
larger sabotage actions”.
creased coercive measures targeting other groups. On the other hand, at the be-
ginning of 1944, when those born between 1919 and 1924 were mobilized
throughout Serbia, work in the mine could offer protection from military ser-
vice.59
The coalfields of Trbovlje in southern Styria – to continue this intra-Yugo-
slav comparison – had a war experience similar to that of Bor. Yet, forced la-
bour in the narrower sense was not the core characteristic there. The Slovene in-
dustry was put under German control through Austrian economic structures. In
Austria, the Alpine Montan AG had held a quasi-monopoly in the Austrian min-
ing industry. Now it was a part of the Reichswerke “Hermann Göring”, which
was responsible for the entire coal mining industry and the organisation of the
labour deployment. The German occupying forces introduced a rigorous policy
of Germanisation – about 80,000 Slovenes were deported during the first year
of occupation. National socialist rhetoric turned the mining industry and the
whole region into a “traditional” German space. The mine in Trbovlje was
“cleansed”, both ethnically and politically. Yet, the massive deportations had
only a weak impact. In many cases, the mining industry, important for the Ger-
man war economy as it was, provided workers with a protection from deporta-
tion.60
Initially, the coalfields were framed as part of a policy of reintegrating the
“traditional” Styrian economic area, and the occupiers granted them the same
stimulating privileges that were valid for Austria, including tax exemptions and
credits. The German occupying agencies deemed the coalfields technically well-
equipped, and the workers as qualified and able, yet underpaid. German mining
“traditions” were introduced, and social welfare measures emphasized. The
German language became the only legal means of communication. Those em-
ployees who held positions of responsibility, i. e. virtually the whole admin-
istrative personnel, the engineers and skilled workers, but also doctors, were
checked with regard to their political convictions. They had to fill in question-
naires that asked about their ethnicity, citizenship and former citizenship, and
these categories were interpreted in an interesting variety by those questioned.
The Slovenes were more or less deliberate in trying to understand and react to
the new circumstances. When it came to citizenship / former citizenship / eth-
nicity, one wrote for example “citizenship: Yugoslavia / former citizenship:
Austria-Hungary / ethnicity: Slovene, southern Styrian, friend of the Ger-
mans”.61 Ethnically mixed individuals wondered what the most intelligent an-
59 AJ, DK, k. 598, fasc. 648, 1 February, 1944, Bekanntmachung. The foremen in all sections of
the mine were asked to name those workers whom “the enterprise was interested in exempting
from military service”.
60 Cf. RUTAR, Zwischen Volkstumspolitik und Volksbefreiungskampf, for details on what
follows in this section.
61 Arhiv Republike Slovenije (ARS), Energieversorgung Südsteiermark (EV Süd), fasc. 98, Ing.
Franz Stefe, without date.
Sabine Rutar 341
swer was. An employee born in Bosnian Tuzla in 1909 put “Slovene” with a
question mark and “German” in parenthesis, declaring that his father was Slo-
vene and his mother German. His Slovene father, he claimed, had had a strong
identity as an Austrian civil servant. How could he not “count” as a German?62
The same procedure of testing political correctness was applied to freshly re-
cruited employees. Between April and June 1941 many responded to the re-
cruitment calls, and their motives were manifold. They ranged from economic
pressure to fear of being deported, to political intentions in favor of the Ger-
mans or even to the intention to sabotage the mines from within. A clear im-
pression emanating from the sources is that the Slovenes very rarely expressed
any loyalty towards the Serb-dominated Yugoslav state, connecting to it rather
experiences of ethnic and political pressure. Several of those who applied for
work in the mine attempted to justify any “politically incorrect” behaviour as a
result of the discriminatory practices in Yugoslavia.63 On the whole, the entries
convey a confused, yet stubborn maintenance of one’s identity, at the same time
as people tried not to endanger themselves.
A day after the Yugoslav capitulation, on 18 April 1941, Heinrich Himmler
himself ordered that the miners in Trbovlje be exempted from deportation, at
least for the duration of the war. As a solution to the problem of controlling a
traditionally communist-leaning workforce, he imagined literally locking the
miners up. He wished for the coalfields to be treated as a concentration camp
and guarded accordingly. Deportations did affect the coalfields, and it proved
close to impossible to replace the deported workers with adequate substitutes.
The problem was that it was first of all the engineers and qualified personnel
who were considered suspicious of being nationally conscious and therefore dif-
ficult to “convert” to Germandom.64
The situation was complicated by the first huge partisan resistance campaign,
which started in June 1941 after the German attack on the Soviet Union. Both
deportations and disciplinary measures served only to deepen anti-German atti-
tudes among the workers, even among those who initially had been indifferent
or benevolent towards the Germans. At the beginning of 1943, so many workers
were absent that other measures had to be implemented to bring workers in –
62 ARS, EV Süd, fasc. 98, Karl Kobler, without date.

63 ARS, EV Süd, fasc. 98., Pensionierter Direktor der Trifailer K. W. G., 28 May, 1941; ibid.,
Dienstanerbieten des Franz Žuran, 5 June, 1941. Cf. the edited version of this document in
Klaus TENFELDE / Hans-Christoph SEIDEL (eds.), Zwangsarbeit im Bergwerk. Der Arbeitsein-
satz im Kohlenbergbau des Deutschen Reiches und der besetzten Gebiete im Ersten und
Zweiten Weltkrieg, vol. 2: Dokumente, Essen 2005, doc. 608.
64 Tone FERENC (ed.), Quellen zur nationalsozialistischen Entnationalisierungspolitik in Slowe-
nien 1941-1945 / Viri o nacistiþni raznarodnovalni politiki v Sloveniji 1941-1945, Maribor
1980, doc. 23: Richtlinien und Anweisungen des Reichskommissars für die Festigung deut-
schen Volkstums zur Aussiedlung von Slowenen und Ansiedlung von Deutschen in der Un-
tersteiermark, 18 April, 1941.
this situation resembled the one in Bor. It proved impossible to import workers
from Croatia; then, in October 1943, several hundred ethnic Germans were
brought in from Bosnia. They were not able to fill the gaps among the mine’s
skilled personnel, however. In fact the removal of skilled labourers proved to be
one of the partisan movement’s most effective tactics. Among the occupiers,
Trbovlje came to be called the “panslavic-communist” centre. In June 1943,
Himmler declared the coalfields to be a Bandenkampfgebiet, that is an area
heavily affected by partisan warfare. Security measures were increased, barbed
wire was put around the mine shafts, factory premises were fenced in, and the
number of guards was increased. An attempt was made to counter the problem
of factory guards who had been mobilized into the Wehrmacht by putting war
invalids in their place. The partisan action was effective in the region – the
workers became ever more politicized. Assassinations of security personnel in-
creased. Workers were either recruited into the partisans by force or threatened
not to work. As a result, they feared both the Germans and the partisans.
To conclude: in Trbovlje as well as Bor the workforce changed during the
course of the war. In Trbovlje, workers labelled as politically unsustainable, i.e.
both national Slovene and/or communist workers and engineers, were deported.
Yet, it quickly became obvious that the skills of the original workers could not
be adequately replaced. The majority of the workforce remained politically in-
active until the end of 1943. In the course of 1944, however, this changed. The
partisans called for a general strike that September, which ended the occupation
of the coalfields. There is a clear correlation between the effects of the brutal
Germanizing policies, the increasing success of the resistance movement and
the waning belief in German strength on the one hand and the behaviour of the
miners on the other. Fear of the partisans also played a role, as these used co-
erced recruitment and the liquidation of political opponents to pressure the min-
eworkers.
Thus, different, regionally shaped spaces of war experience existed, to speak
with Reinhart Koselleck again, conditioning the horizons of expectation with
regard to the times after the end of the war in the northern Yugoslav coalfield of
Trbovlje and the southeastern Yugoslav copper mine of Bor. The industrializa-
tion of the latter started more than half a century later. It happened under state
socialist circumstances and followed upon the experience of economic exploita-
tion and forced labour during the Second World War. To be sure, eastern Serbia
did know unrest and protest in the interwar period. As previously mentioned,
the peasants reacted violently to the destruction of their means of living. But,
different from the Slovenian mines, a political workers’ movement hardly
played any role there. Still, all mining industries were turned into symbols of
the rapid industrialization efforts after the Second World War, and the miners
became “heroes of work” in the process. They were stylized to represent both
the visions and the enactment of state socialist society.
Sabine Rutar 343
Heroes of Work:
Labour in the Yugoslav Self-Management System
Yugoslav society was divided into heroes and traitors at the end of the Second
World War. At the same time, unwanted elements were removed or discrimi-
nated against in the course of the establishment of Tito’s regime. These actions
established social patterns that have remained relevant until today, despite many
efforts to come to terms with them. Within the socialist culture of remembrance,
the space left to those who had worked for the enemy was ambivalent. It was
dependent on the individual’s specific affiliations, the temporal dynamic of his
or her repatriation, and later the changing sociopolitical constellations within
Titoist Yugoslavia. As a self-sufficient victim category, Yugoslav forced la-
bourers were of minor significance – what was important was their classifica-
tion as “good communists” or “bad others”. Mining, regardless of the specific
socio-economic textures alluded to above, was one of the industries most im-
portant not only for the war economy, but also for the socialist industrialization
project. The history of mining regions aptly illustrates, therefore, the paths of
those who worked in German-occupied plants during the war, yet found them-
selves on the winning side in the postwar era and without necessarily having to
prove the “correctness” of their attitudes through adherence to the liberation
movement.
Thus the transition from the conditions of war economy to socialist planned
economy represented a break with the past on many levels, especially because it
produced certain deliberate amnesias. From other perspectives, the end of the
war brought continuities – possibly even for those who “simply” continued to
work at their given workplace, now, again, for a new boss. Many enterprises,
including many mines, had been destroyed by the partisans or by the retreating
occupying armies. Hence, re-construction was the order of the day in the wake
of the war. Moreover, between 1945 and 1951, the last year of the five-year-
plan installed in 1947 and the year when western financial aid was initiated,65
four variants of unfree labour were legally institutionalized. These were forced
labour without detention, forced labour with detention, labour for re-socializa-
tion and so-called socially useful labour.66 These forms of unfree labour as well
as voluntary unpaid labour were a core characteristic of the Stalinist-inspired
Yugoslav early postwar period. They actually gained in importance during the
Cominform-conflict of 1948, when Yugoslavia remained both politically and
65 Cf. Dragan BOGETIû, Western Economic and Military Aid to Yugoslavia during the Conflict
with the Cominform, in: Jasna FISCHER et al. (eds.), Jugoslavija v hladni vojni / Yugoslavia in
the Cold War, Ljubljana 2004, 295-318, 296f.
66 Milko MIKOLA, Delo kot kazen. Izrekanje in izvrševanje kazni prisilnega, poboljševalnega in
družbeno koristnega dela v Sloveniji v obdobju 1945-1951, Celje 2002, 7. Forced labour
without detention and re-socializing labour were joined into one juridical category in 1948.
economically isolated. Much of the workforce was organized in labour brigades.

Among the initiators of these brigades was the Bosnian miner Alija Sirotanoviü.
He was stylized as a Yugoslav Stakhanov for surpassing his Soviet predecessor
in the amount of coal he and his equipe extracted during a single shift.67 The
youth of these brigades were involved in huge collective and all-Yugoslav pro-
jects in the name of “brotherhood and unity”. They built highways (e.g. the
north-south-running Autoput), railway connections (e.g. the section between
Belgrade and Bar) and the Novi Beograd district in Belgrade.68
The Yugoslav self-management system, introduced in 1950 as a result of the
economic isolation prompted by the Tito-Stalin-split and henceforth propagated
as a genuinely Yugoslav “third way”, aroused considerable benevolent interest
not least among the political Left in western Europe.69 In fact, the entangled his-
tory of western and Yugoslav communisms makes for a fascinating potential
field of study.70 An enormous literature exists on the theme of workers’ self-
management in Titoist Yugoslavia. A search in the Slovenian, Croatian, and
Serbian library catalogues under the key words self-management and Yugosla-
via (samoupravljanje, Jugoslavija) returns more than 500 monographs. Most of
these are of a policy-oriented, economic, or sociological nature. Much of the
older work was concerned with the political-ideological and/or economic con-
texts and was solidly embedded in the Cold War framework, as well as in the
67 The online project Sfrj.tv features a nice film clipping conveying Sirotanoviü’s symbolic
meaning, cf. SFRJ za poþetnike – Alija Sirotanoviü, at <http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=v48q4hqIy4>. See also Rade ALAVANTIû, Rudar socijalistiþke Jugoslavije, Beograd 1950,
34-40. Ibid., 7, features a list of the voluntary working hours employed to re-construct mines
that had been destroyed in the war.
68 Jože PRINýIý, Prostovoljno in prisilno delo, in: Slovenska kronika XX. stoletja. 1941-1995,
Ljubljana 1996, 179. Cf. SUNDHAUSSEN, Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten, 131-136,
for a synthesis of the massive industrializing spurt experienced by Yugoslavia’s first postwar
generation.
69 For an overview on the Yugoslav self-management system cf. SUNDHAUSSEN, Jugoslawien
und seine Nachfolgestaaten, 98-112.
70 Cf. Nikolas DÖRR, Die Beziehungen zwischen der SED und den kommunistischen Parteien
West- und Südeuropas. Handlungsfelder, Akteure und Probleme, in: Arnd BAUERNKÄMPER /
Francesco DI PALMA (eds.), Bruderparteien jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs. Die Beziehungen
der SED zu den kommunistischen Parteien West-und Südeuropas (1968-1989), Berlin 2011,
48-65. Cf. in this context Thomas KROLL, Kommunistische Intellektuelle in Westeuropa.
Frankreich, Österreich, Italien und Großbritannien im Vergleich (1945-1956), Köln et al.
2007; Geoff ELEY, Forging Democracy. The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, Ox-
ford 2002 (and several of Eley’s other works); Stefano BARTOLINI, The Political Mobilisation
of the European Left 1860-1980. The Class Cleavage, Cambridge 2000; as well as a collec-
tion of essays concerning the concept of a “Third Way” during the Cold War, Dominik
GEPPERT / Udo WENGST (eds.), Neutralität – Chance oder Chimäre? Konzepte des Dritten
Weges für Deutschland und die Welt 1945-1990, München 2005, therein Svetozar RAJAK,
Auf der Suche nach einem Leben außerhalb der beiden Blöcke: Jugoslawiens Weg in die
Blockfreiheit, 155-176.
Sabine Rutar 345
dominant field of structural approaches to scholarly writing.71 Since the end of

the 1960s, Yugoslav industrial sociologists and economists have reflected criti-
cally on this model and the actual participatory practices open to workers as
well as on conflict management among the managers and on the shop floor.72
The Yugoslav workers’ system of self-management is thus relevant throughout
Europe as a model socialist market economy. It attracted the attention of west-
ern societies as well as other state socialist societies. Some even advocated its
implementation elsewhere. The chance to historicize this economic model be-
yond premises defined by political-ideological objectives and beyond the focus
on ethnonationalism and state dissolution has not yet been seized.73 After 1990,
Titoist conditions of labour fell into oblivion. Several scholars have, however,
explored the memory of working lives under socialism and the experience of
transition.74 Two more topical tropes are comprehensively connected to this,
namely the history of Yugoslav migrant workers and of unemployment. Both
are specifically Yugoslav features of state socialism – and clearly part and parcel
of a European and global experience of labour.75 The historiography of other
71 Empirical studies are e. g. Alan EAMES, The Limits of Participation – Based on an Empirical
Study of Industrial Management in Yugoslav Enterprises, in: Hans G. NUTZINGER (ed.),
Mitbestimmung und Arbeiterselbstverwaltung. Praxis und Programmatik, Frankfurt/M. 1982,
111-124; Wolfgang SOERGEL, Arbeiterselbstverwaltung oder Managersozialismus? Eine em-
pirische Untersuchung in jugoslawischen Industriebetrieben, München 1979; Gudrun LEMÂN,
Das jugoslawische Modell. Wege zur Demokratisierung, Frankfurt/M. 1976.
72 Cf. e. g. the annual journal “Aktuelni problemi privrednih kretanja Jugoslavije”, published
from 1968 onwards by the Economic Institute in Zagreb and the monthly “Radni odnosi i
samoupravljanje”, published from 1970 onwards by the Center of Law and Economy in Bel-
grade. Works in the vein of the following abound: Jakov SIROTKOVIû, Privredni sistem i
društveno planiranje Jugoslavije, Zagreb 1964; Josip ŽUPANOV, Samoupravljanje i društvena
moü. Prilozi za socijologiju samoupravne organizacije, Zagreb 1969; Jakov SIROTKOVIû,
Uzroci, rezultati i perpektive privredne i društvene reforme, Šibenik 1970; Vladimir
ARZENŠEK, Ekonomske, socialne in psihološke determinante kolektivnih sporov v delovnih
organizacijah Slovenije, Ljubljana 1975; Neca JOVANOV, Radniþki štrajkovi u Socijalistiþkoj
Federativnoj Republici Jugoslaviji od 1958. do 1969. godine, Belgrade 1979.
73 Aleksandar Jakir’s attempt to prove the connection between economic mechanisms and the
rise of nationalism was developed under the strong impression of state dissolution and has not
yet seen any more in-depth follow up, cf. Aleksandar JAKIR, Workers’ Self-Management in
Tito’s Yugoslavia Revisited, in: ADANIR (ed.), Social Movements in Southeast Europe, 137-
156.
74 Predrag J. MARKOVIû, Wahrheit und Erinnerung an die Arbeit im sozialistischen Jugoslawien
– zwischen Kritik und Märchen vom Schlaraffenland, in: Klaus ROTH (ed.), Arbeit im Sozia-
lismus – Arbeit im Postsozialismus. Erkundungen zum Arbeitsleben im östlichen Europa,
Münster 2004, 259-272; Nina VODOPIVEC, Yesterday’s Heroes: Spinning Webs of Memory in
a Postsocialist Textile Factory in Slovenia, in: KOLEVA (ed.), Negotiating Normality, 43-62;
Narodna Umjetnost 50 (2013), no. 1, thematic issue “Working Cultures / Cultures of Work”,
focussing on the second half of the 20th century as well as the beginning of the 21st.
75 The attention paid to Yugoslav labour migrants has recently increased, cf. Ulf BRUNNBAUER,
Labour Emigration from the Yugoslav Region from the Late 19th Century until the End of So-
cialism. Continuities and Changes; and Karolina NOVINŠýAK, The Recruiting and Sending of
state socialist realities is slightly more varied, the GDR being by far the most
extensively covered.76
The Yugoslav formula – invented against the Soviet model of centralist eco-
nomic management – of a voluntary and independent union of entrepreneurs
who form “collective enterprises” caused the institutionalization of workers
councils and other instruments intended to include the shop floor collective in
decision-making processes. Until the 1970s, the system of self-management saw
various reforms. By 1965 at the latest, however, market economic principles
were linked to the self-management model. The increasing discrepancies be-
tween theory and practice were becoming all too evident, heightening the frus-
tration on the part of those involved in self-management.77 This process was
complicated by the pertinence of socio-economic disparity within Yugoslavia
inherited from previous times, as well as the country’s ethnonational and reli-
gious plurality. Adaptations of collective patterns of authority and solidarity
were not least conditioned by the specific circumstances in the different Yugo-
slav regions. The interchange between social security and the renunciation of
individual and political freedom worked for almost two decades. Yugoslav self-
management was a constant process of negotiation deployed in order to contain
looming conflict and to enforce consent. The tensions between the amalgama-
tion of participatory rights and the inherent control mechanisms in the Yugoslav
system of self-management pose a fascinating field of study, which, too, can
draw on Lüdtke’s notion of Eigen-Sinn. Fostering research that aims to better
understand mechanisms in work relationships that were intended to contain so-
cial conflict, and investigating those occasions in which these mechanisms
failed seems a particularly fruitful path of study.78
Gastarbeiter to Germany. Between Socialist Demands and Economic Needs, both in: Ulf
BRUNNBAUER (ed.), Transnational Societies, Transterritorial Politics. Migrations in the Post-
Yugoslav Region, 19th-21st Century, München 2009, 17-50 and 121-144. Cf. Susan L.
WOODWARD, Socialist Unemployment. The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990,
Princeton/N.J. 1995.
76 HÜBNER / KLEßMANN / TENFELDE (eds.), Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus, contains case studies
on Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary as well as wider eastern Europe; ROTH (ed.), Arbeit im Sozia-
lismus – Arbeit im Postsozialismus; Id. (ed.), Arbeitswelt – Lebenswelt: Facetten einer span-
nungsreichen Beziehung im östlichen Europa, Berlin 2006. On industrial labour lives in
Bulgaria Ulf BRUNNBAUER, “Die sozialistische Lebensweise”. Ideologie, Gesellschaft, Fami-
lie und Politik in Bulgarien (1944-1989), Wien et al. 2007. On the GDR cf. for example
KLEßMANN, Arbeiter im “Arbeiterstaat” DDR; Peter HÜBNER / Klaus TENFELDE (eds.), Arbei-
ter in der SBZ – DDR, Essen 1999; Jeannette Z. MADARÁSZ, Working in East Germany.
Normality in a Socialist Dictatorship, 1961-79, Basingstoke/N.Y. 2006; Andrew I. PORT, Die
rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR. Arbeit und Alltag im sozialistischen Deutschland, Berlin 2010;
Francesca WEIL, Herrschaftsanspruch und soziale Wirklichkeit. Zwei Betriebe in der DDR
während der Honecker-Ära, Wien et al. 2000.
77 SUNDHAUSSEN, Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten, 159-167.
78 Research currently under way includes my own project on “Labour Relations, Social Protest,
Sabine Rutar 347
Between January 1958, when the first strike broke out in Trbovlje – seem-
ingly paying tribute, once again, to the town’s rebellious reputation – and 1971,
the year of the so-called “Croatian Spring”, there were more than 2,000 strikes
in Yugoslavia. Most of them took place in Slovenia (more than 500), followed
by Serbia (about 400), and Croatia (about 350). This provoked an extensive de-
bate about the workers’ right to strike, followed by attempts to make the strike a
legitimate part of the system. Only if protest touched the national dimension
was it to be considered dangerous. Socially motivated strikes were to be kept
under control by incorporating them into the system. This entailed a combined
effort to both legalize and repress these strikes.79
In hindsight, the failure of the Yugoslav state and the full-fledged wars of
state dissolution seem to have emerged from a radical failure of control and me-
diating mechanisms in Titoist Yugoslavia, a failure imposed as much by the po-
litical system as by the economic model advocating self-management. Ulti-
mately, in the course of Slobodan Miloševiü’s rise to power in the late 1980s,
the sociopolitical stalemate that had been aggravated since 1974 and intensified
after Tito’s death in 1980, permitted the conscious decision at the top political
level to accept and promote violence as a political means. Mobilization and in-
strumentalization of the populace happened through massive abuse of the “poli-
tics of the street” and of the media. Increasing our knowledge about how politi-
cal threats, challenges to legitimacy, and heightening social tensions were dealt
with on the shop floor would indeed deepen our understanding of why the
Yugoslav project had such a horrific aftermath. The imperative to contain both
social and national conflict, to ideologically declare them non-existent and/or
resolved conditioned social relationships at the workplace, as one of the central
loci of the Titoist socialist system, and shaped the ways in which control and
mediating mechanisms functioned here – or failed to function.80
and Violence in the Shipyard and Port Workers’ Milieus on Both Sides of the Italo-Yugoslav
Border During the Cold War”, cf. <http://www.physicalviolence.eu/user/10/researchpro-
posal>, as well as Ulrike Schult’s PhD project on “Worlds of Labour in Self-managed Social-
ism: Yugoslavia 1960-1990”, which she is pursuing at the University of Jena. Schult focuses
on two vehicle and motor producing enterprises in the Serbian city of Kragujevac and the
Slovene city of Maribor. Cf. also Todor KULJIû, Der flexible Feind. Zur Rolle des Antibüro-
kratismus bei der Legitimierung von Titos Selbstverwaltungssystem, in: Jahrbuch für For-
schungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 10 (2011), no. 3, 58-70.
79 Martin IVANIý, Stavka v rudnikih Trbovlje-Hrastnik in Zagorje, 13.-16. januar 1958, Ljublja-
na 1986.
80 The Yugoslav socialist strikes and protests were first analytically observed while they were
happening, posing a treasure trove for research into this unique state socialist experience, cf.
JOVANOV, Radniþki štrajkovi; ŽUPANOV, Samoupravljanje i društvena moü; Jugoslawien /
Streiks: Gehetzte Hasen, Der Spiegel 39 (1969), 22 September, 1969, at <http://www.
spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45562569.html>; Zdenko ANTIû, Dockers’ Strike Successful in Yu-
goslav Port of Rijeka, Radio Free Europe Research: Communist Area, 16 June, 1971, Open
A “Southeastern” and a “Western” Common Space of Resonance:

Labour in the Italo-Yugoslav Borderlands during the Cold War
The ways in which Yugoslav worlds of labour during state socialism represent a
particularly rich instance of entanglement become obvious when one compares
cases of yet another eminent and “classical” industrial category: the dockyard
and port workers’ milieus in the cities along the border between Italy and Yugo-
slavia. Until well into the Cold War, this border remained contested. The No-
vember 1975 Treaty of Osimo, ratified only shortly after the Cold War’s “wa-
tershed” (Eric J. Hobsbawm), the Helsinki Accords of August of the same year
(signed by both Italy and Yugoslavia),81 provided the final legal determination
of the postwar border that had been established in 1954 as a de facto boundary
by the so-called London Memorandum.82
In Italy, the cities of Trieste, Monfalcone and Muggia traditionally possessed
strong labour movements. In the aftermath of the Second World War, many
workers encountered Tito-communism with interest and goodwill. In 1946-
1947, several thousand migrated from northeastern Italy into Yugoslavia, in or-
der to construct a communist society there.83 Massive migrations out of Yugo-
slavia, comprised mostly of ethnic Italians, occurred from Istria between 1945
and 1954. Such migrations became especially widespread after the peace treaty
of 1947, which transferred a large part of the peninsula to Yugoslav sov-
ereignty.84 After the Tito-Stalin conflict of 1948, migration took on also a dif-
ferent tone as those communists who condemned Tito’s policies found them-
Society Archive, Budapest (HU OSA 300-8-3:79-4-4), available at <http://fa.osaarchivum.

org/background-reports?col=8&id=33037>.
81 The anniversary in 2005 received some local attention, cf. e.g. the collective volume produced
at the University of Koper, Jože PIRJEVEC / Borut KLABJAN / Gorazd BAJC (eds.), Osimska
meja: jugoslovansko-italijanska pogajanja in razmejitev leta 1975, Koper 2006.
82 For details see Sabine RUTAR, Labour and Communism in Yugoslavia and Italy. Trieste and
the Northeastern Adriatic during the Cold War (1945-1975). A Contribution to the Renewal
of Workers’ History, in: Acta Histriae 18 (2010), no. 1-2, 247-74.
83 The largest group comprised over 2,000 skilled workers from the Monfalcone shipyard. Cf.
Rolf WÖRSDÖRFER, Krisenherd Adria 1915-1955. Konstruktion und Artikulation des
Nationalen im italienisch-jugoslawischen Grenzraum, Paderborn 2004, 485, where the dock-
workers in Monfalcone are described as “enthusiastic adherents of the Yugoslav revolution”.
Cf. Andrea BERRINI, Noi siamo la classe operaia: i duemila di Monfalcone, Milano 2004; and
Marco PUPPINI, Costruire un mondo nuovo: un secolo di lotte operaie nel Cantiere di
Monfalcone, storie di uomini, di passioni e di valori, Gradisca d’Isonzo 2008.
84 Pamela BALLINGER, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans,
Princeton/N.J. 2003; the contributions by Marina Cattaruzza, Luciano Giuricin, Orietta
Moscarda, Raoul Pupo, Antonio Sema, Roberto Spazzali, and Marta Verginella on the Istrian
“exodus” in Marina CATTARUZZA / Marco DOGO / Raoul PUPO (eds.), Esodi: trasferimenti
forzati di popolazione nel Novecento europeo, Napoli 2000.
Sabine Rutar 349
selves in danger.85 For the Yugoslav state, these migrations caused significant
damage, both in terms of economy and of image, since they seemed to signify
that life under communism was impossible. The Italian state, for its part, sought
to lure migrants through propaganda and through a concerted policy of settle-
ment. With these measures, it sought to Italianize those areas of Trieste’s hin-
terland that had formerly possessed an ethnic Slovene majority.86
In the Italo-Yugoslav multiethnic border region, the national-ideological con-
frontation was inextricably entangled with the political-ideological one. The
dock and shipyard workers in all the aforementioned cities could look back on a
vibrant communist underground movement in interwar fascist Italy.87 They
were shaped by both the two decades of fascist statehood and the subsequent
war. The composition of the workforce was transformed through war casualties
and the influx of nonindustrial workers’ groups, war veterans, refugees, and dis-
placed persons. Neither labour history nor economic history have yet tied the
construction of a “new order” of industrial relations closely to the issue of the
political integration of the workforce into the respective social system. Till
Kössler has used the example of the communist movement in the Ruhr Valley
after 1945 to observe an increasing “integration of the workforce into the politi-
cal system of the Federal Republic of Germany”.88
What did democratization look like in the postwar Italian Republic, which
constructed anti-fascism as its founding myth? What differences did exist be-
tween centre and periphery with respect to this integration? How did workers on
both sides of the Cold War border in the northeastern Adriatic position them-
selves in relation to the antagonism between Stalinist-Italian and Titoist-Yugo-
slav communism? How was this enmity reflected in the milieus of port and
shipyard workers on both sides of the border? Were there unique Slovenian or
Croatian characteristics? What was the collective Yugoslav disposition? How
85 Ivo BANAC, With Stalin against Tito. Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism, Ithaca
1988; from the Italian perspective Giacomo SCOTTI, Goli Otok. Italiani nel gulag di Tito, Tri-
este 32002.
86 Pamela BALLINGER, Trieste. The City as Displaced Persons Camp, in: Sabine RUTAR (ed.),
Borderland Istria, thematic issue of the Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 8
(2006), 153-174; Aleksander PANJEK, Ricostruire Trieste. Politiche e pratiche migratorie nel
secondo dopoguerra, Trieste 2006; Sandi VOLK, Esuli a Trieste. Bonifica nazionale e
rafforzamento dell'italianità sul confine orientale, Udine 2004; Id., Istra v Trstu. Naselitev
istrskih in dalmatisnkih ezulov in nacionalna bonifikacija na Tržaškem, Koper 2003.
87 On the Monfalcone anti-fascist workers’ movement in the interwar period cf. Galliano
FOGAR, L’antifascismo operaio monfalconese tra le due guerre, Milano 1982.
88 Till KÖSSLER, Arbeiter und Demokratiegründung in Westdeutschland nach 1945. Das Beispiel
der kommunistischen Bewegung, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen 2 (2006), no. 1, at
<http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/portal/alias__zeithistorische-forschungen/lang__
de/tabID__40208649/Default.aspx>. See also his monograph Abschied von der Revolution.
Kommunisten und Gesellschaft in Westdeutschland 1945-1968, Düsseldorf 2005.
did the integration of the workforce into the milieu of the workplace and the po-
litical system occur in the processes of state formation?
A comparative microstudy of labour milieus in everyday life on either side of
the border between the eastern and western systems possesses great potential for
methodological innovation. Such a study would take the workplace seriously as
a realm of social activity and connect the change in internal worker relations
with the general transformative processes in Italian and Yugoslav societies.89
The problems of writing a contemporary history of the Italian-Yugoslav border
region resemble, in substance if not in structure, the reasons for the absence of a
“comprehensive account of common German history after 1945”. The lack of a
“theoretical approach that could place dictatorship and democracy into a rela-
tionship with one another” is particularly problematic.90 The layers compli-
cating the writing of such a history of the Italian-Yugoslav border area are even
more intricate due to the multiethnic composition of the region.
A comparative analysis of port and shipyard workers should make labour’s
daily life apparent as a “code for a complex perspective”, and as “an entire clus-
ter of elaborated theoretical and methodological approaches”, whose common
denominator “remains the critique of concepts of social order by and large, of
master narratives whose claim to be able to systemize history is called into
question”.91 The respective master narratives, whether of a national or a political
systemic nature, stand in contrast to the diverse horizons of experience and the
actions of individuals, which can be totally at odds with these narratives. Often
however, individuals perceive the master narrative in a reflected or unreflected
manner, and revise, alter, or selectively acknowledge it. Such behaviour has
been demonstrated by means of the aforementioned war experiences. Loyalty is
a key conception in the re-building of states out of war-torn societies. On the
one hand, loyalty serves as a structural-functional category, as a “cement” or
“bond” between differing authority-wielding and authority-subjected social
groups. On the other hand, it is a discursive category in the construction and ar-
ticulation of expectations, of perceptions, of representations, of worlds of mean-
ing, and of competitions of interpretation. It is a category that contributes to our
understanding of communicative interaction among social groups. Both cate-
gorical types are to be understood as gradual and process-like, with certain
89 To produce such a comparative microstudy is the aim of my aforementioned project “Labour

Relations, Social Protest, and Violence in the Shipyard and Port Workers’ Milieus on Both
Sides of the Italo-Yugoslav Border during the Cold War”.
90 Konrad H. JARAUSCH, “Die Teile als Ganzes erkennen.” Zur Integration der beiden deutschen
Nachkriegsgeschichten, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2004), no. 1, 2, at <http://www.
zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Jarausch-1-2004>. Cf. also the extensive writings
by Christoph KLEßMANN on this topic, e. g. Konturen einer integrierten Nachkriegsgeschichte,
in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 55 (2005), no. 18/19, 3-11; Id. (ed.), The Divided Past:
Rewriting Post-War German History, Oxford et al. 2001.
91 DAVIS / LINDENBERGER / WILDT, Einleitung, 17.
Sabine Rutar 351
events, structural crises, and changing political constellations playing a decisive

role in changing patterns of allegiance.92 The “set of people’s diverse ‘motives
of compliance’ which make authority possible”93 should be diversified through
the connection between societies on both sides of the Cold War divide, that is
between “the East” (here: Yugoslavia) and “the West” (here: Italy). Thus, au-
thority should not be understood as a synonym of dictatorship. The Weberian
dialectic between a network of social relationships between those who exercise
authority and those who submit to it remains a valid tool.94
The Italian purveyors of microstoria, following the path cleared by Carlo
Ginzburg, have not yet engaged much with the contemporary history of Italy’s
eastern border.95 Microhistorical efforts have increased recently in Slovenia, al-
luding to a paradigm shift towards a social and political history that is informed
by cultural history.96 In the 1980s, the topic of self-management inspired several
Italian-Yugoslav joint academic endeavours.97 There exists an Italian literature
on the labour union movement in Venezia Giulia that is anchored in social his-
tory,98 and on the effects of (geo-)politics on the economy.99 Jože Prinþiþ stud-
92 Peter HASLINGER / Volker ZIMMERMANN, Loyalitäten im Staatssozialismus. Leitfragen und

Forschungsperspektiven, in: Volker ZIMMERMANN / Peter HASLINGER / Tomáš NIGRIN (eds.),
Loyalitäten im Staatssozialismus. DDR, Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Marburg 2010, 3-24.
93 Cf. the description of the project “Socialist Dictatorship as a World of Meaning. Representa-
tions of Social Order and Transformation of Authority in East Central Europe after 1945”,
coordinated by the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and the Centre for Contempo-
rary History, Potsdam, at <http://www.sinnwelt.usd.cas.cz/>.
94 Some reflections pointing in this direction in Jože PIRJEVEC, L’Italia repubblicana e la
Jugoslavia comunista, in: Franco BOTTA / Italo GARZIA / Pasquale GUARAGNELLA (eds.), La
questione adriatica e l’allargamento dell’Unione Europea, Milano 2007, 45-61.
95 Among the most interesting studies – and partly using microhistorical tools – are Marina
CATTARUZZA, L’Italia e il confine orientale, 1866-2006, Bologna 2007; Ariella VERROCCHIO
(ed.), Trieste tra ricostruzione e ritorno all’Italia (1945-1954), Trieste 2004; Pier Angelo
TONINELLI / Anna Maria VINCI / Giulio MELLINATO (eds.), La città reale. Economia, società e
vita quotidiana 1945-1954, Trieste 2004; Giampaolo VALDEVIT, La questione di Trieste 1941-
54. Politica internazionale e contesto locale, Milano 1986; Claudio TONEL / Alessandro
NATTA (eds.), Comunisti a Trieste – un’identità difficile, Roma 1983; Claudio TONEL (ed.),
Storia e attualità di Trieste nella riflessione dei comunisti, Roma 1985.
96 E. g. Aleksander PANJEK, Tržaška obnova: ekonomske in migracijske politike na Svobodnem
tržaškem ozemlju, Koper 2011.
97 Cooperazione ed autogestione in Italia ed in Jugoslavia. Atti del seminario, Roma 1986;
L’autogestione jugoslava, Milano 1982, with contributions from Jože Pirjevec, Stefano
Bianchini, Marco Dogo, Karel Šiškoviþ and others. References to the Yugoslav model can al-
so be found in Mark HOLMSTRÖM, Industrial Democracy in Italy. Workers Co-Ops and the
Self-Management Debate, Aldershot 1989.
98 Massimo GOBESSI, Cantieri addio! Le lotte, le conquiste e la vita quotidiana nei cantieri e
nelle fabbriche, Trieste 2001; Cristiana COLUMMI, “... anche l‘uomo doveva essere di ferro”.
Classe e movimento operaio a Trieste nel secondo dopoguerra, Milano 1986; Paolo SEMA, Il
cantiere S. Rocco: Lavoro e lotta operaia, 1858-1982, Trieste 1989; Id., Cronaca sindacale
triestina 1943-1978, Roma 1981.
99 Giulio SAPELLI, Trieste italiana. Mito e destino economico, Milano 1990.
ied the Slovenian transborder economic history during socialism.100 The Yugo-
slavs’ supply of consumer goods, most of which entered Yugoslavia from Tri-
este, has emerged as another field of research.101 The negotiation of sociopoliti-
cal and sociocultural processes for the construction of meaning among the dif-
ferent communist groupings in the Italian-Yugoslav border region and their im-
pact on the workforce remains unexplored. Similarly, the transformation of the
bases of legitimation for those who were constitutive participants in the estab-
lishment of political milieus, and how they related to the central parties in their
respective countries as well as to changes in international politics remain under-
studied issues.102
The Yugoslav third way and the strong Italian communism – with the Partito
Comunista Italiano (PCI) as the largest non-ruling communist party in Europe –
offer the opportunity to compare communisms in the northeastern Adriatic with
other west European societies (in particular, but not exclusively, with that of
France). It also contains the potential for inciting research into further southeast
European realms, where it can enhance the understanding of four varieties of
communism that remain understudied in terms of social and societal history.
These are the Albanian self-isolation; the failure of the communists to seize
power in Greece, mostly due to shifting alliances and the actions of the super-
powers; national communism in Romania, which conformed only partially to
the Soviet system; and the comparatively unspectacular and dogmatic Bulgarian
regime.103
100 Jože PRINýIý, Obmejno gospodarsko sodelovanje Slovenije z Avstrijo, Italijo in Madžarsko
(1945-1991), in: Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 46 (2006), no. 1, 413-424; Id., Primorsko
gospodarstvo v þasu vojaških zasedbenih con (1945-1954), in: ibid. 48 (2008), no. 1, 147-160.
Generally on Slovenian economic history cf. Žarko LAZAREVIû, Kontinuitäten und Brüche.
Der lange Weg zu einer slowenischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, in:
Sabine RUTAR / Rolf WÖRSDÖRFER (eds.), Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slo-
wenien, Essen 2009, 51-70.
101 On Trieste Breda LUTHAR, For the Love of the Goods. The Politics of Consumption in Social-
ism, in: BRUNNBAUER / TROEBST (eds.), Zwischen Amnesie und Nostalgie, 165-184; Bojan
HIMMELREICH, Preskrba prebivalstva Slovenije z blagom široke potrošnje v letih 1945-1953,
doktorska disertacija, Celje 2007. Interesting in this context GRANDITS / TAYLOR (eds.), Yu-
goslavia’s Sunny Side; Breda LUTHAR, Shame, Desire and Longing for the West: A Case
Study of Consumption, in: Id. / PUŠNIK (eds.), Remembering Utopia, 341-378; DUDA, U
potrazi za blagostanjem; Id., Pronaÿeno blagostanje.
102 Methodologically important in this context is Harald WYDRA, Communism and the Emer-
gence of Democracy, Cambridge 2007. More generally, Barbara STOLLBERG-RILINGER (ed.),
Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen?, Berlin 2005; and Thomas MERGEL,
Kulturgeschichte der Politik, Version: 1.0, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 11 February, 2010,
available at <https://docupedia.de/zg/Kulturgeschichte_der_Politik?oldid=75525>, 13 March,
2013, containing an overview of the state of research on the issue of a cultural history of the
political.
103 For Bulgaria, BRUNNBAUER “Die sozialistische Lebensweise”, has set the course.
Sabine Rutar 353
The achievements of research into the institutional, social, cultural and every-
day life history, in particular on the GDR and east central Europe can be profita-
bly applied to the study of labour movements and communisms in the Italian-
Yugoslav border region. The latter will also enhance the former: The debate on
the Achilles’ heel of GDR research, namely its far-reaching isolation and self-
referentiality, is now a decade old and it has caused a marked adjustment in re-
search parameters and outlooks. Since Jürgen Kocka’s 2003 call for “the com-
parison of the GDR with other communist dictatorships in east central, south-
eastern, and eastern Europe”104 there has been a development towards a more
comparative perspective in GDR research, predominantly in the direction of
east central Europe, in particular Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. It
seems to have reached a point where an enlargement or yet another shift in fo-
cus is in the wings – both southeastern and western Europe beyond Germany
bear substantial research gaps.105 The Italian-Yugoslav border region, as one of
the most complex regions in contemporary European history, can provide inspi-
ration in both directions.
Conclusion
Sketching a history of Yugoslav labour in the 20th century means contextualiz-

ing both the keywords for an entangled history of labour and the methodologi-
cal tropes useful for pursuing and enlarging it. The varying worlds of labour be-
104 Jürgen KOCKA, Bilanz und Perspektiven der DDR-Forschung. Festvortrag bei der Präsentati-
on der Festschrift aus Anlass des 75. Geburtstages von Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Hermann Weber, on
the website of the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, at <http://www.bund-
esstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/downloads/pdf/kocka_weber.pdf>, 6; cf. Also Matthias MIDDELL,
Kulturtransfer und Historische Komparatistik. Thesen zu ihrem Verhältnis, in: Comparativ 10
(2000), no. 1, 7-41, 30f.; Thomas LINDENBERGER / Martin SABROW, Zwischen Verinselung
und Europäisierung: Die Zukunft der DDR-Geschichte, in: Deutschland Archiv 1 (2004),
123-127, at <http://www.deutschlandarchiv.info/archive /2004/57?page=2>.
105 The international research project “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Social-
ism”, directed by Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, and Pavel KoláĜ and coordinated
by Stephanie Karmann, comprises case studies from the whole of eastern Europe, including
Romania and Yugoslavia, see the project’s website at <http://www.physical-violence.eu>. Cf.
the project “Remembering Communism: Methodological and Practical Issues of Approaching
the Recent Past in Eastern Europe”, directed by Maria Todorova and Stefan Troebst and coor-
dinated by Augusta Dimou. It was financed by the Volkswagen Foundation, focused on case
studies on Bulgaria and Romania and related specifically to the existing scholarship on the
German Democratic Republic and Poland, cf. Stefan TROEBST, Remembering Communism:
Methodological and Practical Issues of Approaching the Recent Past in Eastern Europe, in:
Geschichte.transnational, 31 March, 2006, available at <http://geschichtetransnational.clio-
online.net/projekte/id=169>. Cf. Maria TODOROVA, Remembering Communism: Genres of
Representation, New York 2010; Id. / Stefan TROEBST / Augusta DIMOU (eds.), Remembering
Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe
(forthcoming).
tween agrarianism and slow industrialization processes which existed in the first
half of the century were interrupted by the Second World War and the utterly
radicalized experiences of labour exploitation, violence, and annihilation that it
brought. The intricacies of this war, of which dictatorship was part and parcel,
were not these workers’ only experience of an autocratic system. The socialist
state-building projects, while taking the fascist and national socialist dictator-
ships as their discursive antitheses, featured many structural analogies and con-
tinuities, of which Yugoslavia represented a peculiar example (as did Italy
within the framework of western-type societies). Inherent here are substantial
questions about the birth of “modern social conflict” and more generally, the
geneses of repertoires of action. The issues concerning worlds of labour and of
social conflict should be seen in a long-term perspective. We are to investigate
the mutations of agrarian as well as of industrial societies, the reconfigurations
of their moral economies, as well as the evolution of conflicts and their exten-
sion to larger social environments. What has been presented here in terms of ex-
emplary approaches to historical agency is but a glimpse into the diverse worlds
of southeast European labour history that we have yet to discover and docu-
ment.

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Korrekturabzug zur Freigabe

(Geringfügige Korrekturen werden von uns gewissenhaft ausgeführt.

Studies on South East Europe Studies on South East Europe

Sabine Rutar (Ed.)

Beyond the Balkans

Studies on South East Europe

Korrekturabzug zur Freigabe

(Geringfügige Korrekturen werden von uns gewissenhaft ausgeführt.)

Beyond the Balkans

Korrekturabzug zur Freigabe

(Geringfügige Korrekturen werden von uns gewissenhaft ausgeführt.)

To the memory of Klaus Tenfelde (1944 – 2011)

He was many things, but no Southeast Europeanist.

Editing work on this volume was generously supported by

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Korrekturabzug zur Freigabe

(Geringfügige Korrekturen werden von uns gewissenhaft ausgeführt.)

Towards a Southeast European History of Labour:

problem-stricken national structure said to be “unique in Europe”.4 Anyone who

4 Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Okkupation, Kollaboration und Widerstand in den Ländern Jugoslawi-

east European processes of labour modernisation and the social relationships

Peasants into Workers: the Interwar Period

31 CALIC, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens, 246-258, 296-307.

35 Sabine RUTAR, Zwischen Volkstumspolitik und Volksbefreiungskampf. Braunkohlenabbau

Work for the Enemy: Labour at War

orationist regime, and funded by proceeds derived from confiscated Jewish

50 Arhiv Jugoslavije (AJ), Državna komisija za utvrdjivanje zloþina okupatora i njihovih

54 Interview with Karlo ýerge, Belgrade, February 2003.

62 ARS, EV Süd, fasc. 98, Karl Kobler, without date.

economically isolated. Much of the workforce was organized in labour brigades.

dominant field of structural approaches to scholarly writing.71 Since the end of

A “Southeastern” and a “Western” Common Space of Resonance:

Society Archive, Budapest (HU OSA 300-8-3:79-4-4), available at <http://fa.osaarchivum.

89 To produce such a comparative microstudy is the aim of my aforementioned project “Labour

events, structural crises, and changing political constellations playing a decisive

92 Peter HASLINGER / Volker ZIMMERMANN, Loyalitäten im Staatssozialismus. Leitfragen und

Sketching a history of Yugoslav labour in the 20th century means contextualiz-

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