The Second World War and the Contemporary Slovenian Novel

Abstract

The article deals with the image of the Second World War in three contemporary Slovenian novels placing them in the context of the contemporary Slovenian fiction production, where the topic of the Second World War has been increasingly present over the last decade: Drago Jančar’s I Saw Her That Night, Maruša Krese’s That I am Afraid?, and Maja Haderlap’s The Angel of Oblivion. In analyzing them, the paper highlights their similarities and differences underlining the potentials of the novel about WWII in general. Moreover, the paper outlines the development phases of the Slovenian novel after 1990, pointing out that WWII was not an appealing theme for the poetics of postmodernism which characterized Slovenian fiction in the second half of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. The author argues that the war – which in the Slovenian and Yugoslav context in the period 1941–1945 was inseparably connected to the issues of the revolution, anti-revolution, civil war, collaboration, and the communists coming to power – reveals itself to be productive and inspiring for the contemporary novel. Namely, this topic not only offers a broad historical and thematic field but at the same time demands a sharp ethical reflection, as does any literary representation of the ground-breaking historical events.