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4: CASE STUDY 1: THE ITALIAN/SLOVENIAN BORDER
are told in other places along the border. Like a fable or story that projects
some kind of moral lesson, it is not the content of the story itself that is
important but rather what the story stands for, a way to relate to the border
and to people on the other side. For Antonio it is also, most likely, a way to
deal with his and his family’s traumatic past in relation to the border.
Others have not felt the same need to relate to the border at all. For
Angela, a woman in her early 30s brought up in Gorizia whom I also got in
contact with through common friends, her interest and focus was always
directed westwards, “…my feeling when I was young was to live at the end
of something. Our region is at the ‘periphery’ of Italy, far away from the
capital. My attention was all focussed towards the west, towards the rest of
Italy, the rest of Western Europe and the ‘western world’” (Angela, 2008,
pers. comm.). At a group interview conducted in Skofije 2008 with three
women and four men in their late 70s and early 80s the early years of the
border came back to life through their memories and stories. Many funny
anecdotes were told and one of the ladies sang a song about American
soldiers. There was a lot of laughter and only the occasional sad story. I
wonder if the events were really this uncomplicated or if time passed had
soften these people’s memories. I ask how they felt when the new border
was installed after World War II. They were not worried or upset but they
told me that compared to the Iron Curtain this was nothing. It was still
possible to cross and there were no high concrete walls. Without reflecting
on it they project the image of the Berlin Wall as being synonymous with
the Iron Curtain. There were no such thing here, hence, they do not consider
this to be part of the Iron Curtain.
Antonio thinks the Italian/Yugoslavian border was part of the Iron
Curtain, he says they were poor on the other side, and that they were
communists, but Maria is not so sure. Andrej has a complex way of looking
at the border in relationship to the Iron Curtain. For two days he drives me
around the border areas. He stops and shows me different structures and
sections of the border. He uses the term Iron Curtain a lot. He says things
like “that watchtower was part of the Iron Curtain” or, “that’s where the
Iron Curtain ran”. When our two day tour of the border areas is finished I
ask him if he thinks this border was part of the Iron Curtain and he
immediately answers no. I realise that Andrej in his capacity of museum
director sees the Iron Curtain as something that sells from a heritage point
of view but which also conflicts with his own experiences growing up by the
border. The tourist value that is attached to the Iron Curtain is not farfetched.
On the internet there are plenty of travel descriptions of people
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