Can you explain better the concept of “disorientation” that seems to be a constant trait in people who experienced the conflicts of the twentieth century in border areas?

The disorientation that can be traced by investigating both autobiographical and psychiatric sources in the post-war period of the twentieth century denotes a difficult emotional adaptation to the post-war reality and above all the difficulty in accepting the shifting of borders and the consequent new national belonging of the territory. A part of the individuals, especially those socially or emotionally weaker, were unable to quickly accept the great changes and the new identity politics.

The research I am conducting with an international team of Austrian, Slovenian, Italian and Croatian researchers, as part of the project ERC Eirene which I direct, studies the forms of confusion that in some cases have led to mental illness. The dissolution of state structures, such as that of the Habsburg Empire, or of regimes such as Mussolini's or that of socialist Yugoslavia, has imposed new national sentiments and validated new institutional practices. A part of the residents has been left without a homeland and therefore without citizenship, while national minorities have seen their national rights reduced or have been subjected to persecution, often very violent.

All these changes have caused, especially in the weakest and sometimes even socially marginalized subjects, forms of confusion and therefore also a greater propensity to suffer from depression, melancholy, neurosis and even more serious problems. In other words, people who have not been able to process the mourning for the world they have lost have suffered psychological trauma and have often not been able to recover.

Where do his comparative research on the archives of former psychiatric hospitals come from and what are the peculiarities? Ljubljana e Trieste? 

From the curiosity and the historiographical need to study the North Adriatic area in a transnational and comparative way. The project ERC Eirene It was conceived as an investigation into the post-1918 period, the post-war period and also the XNUMXs, that is, the social consequences of the Yugoslav wars and the processes that arose from the fall of the Berlin Wall. The focus is on women because those who investigate the post-war period are often completely disinterested in the dynamics of gender that is, the female population. Our project instead examines the female population and tries to understand what the role of women was, especially in the border areas and multi-ethnic societies of Venezia Giulia, Carinthia, Prekmurje and Istria.

The aim is to understand the processes of continuity and change, the way in which the rights and freedoms gained thanks to women's involvement in the war were acquired, how the condition of women changed in the immediate post-war period both in the domestic environment and in the professional and public sphere. Psychiatric sources allow us to investigate the forms of suffering and the psychological consequences of wars, in particular bombings, but also those related to malnutrition, material and political precariousness, etc.

Today, anyone who finds themselves living in a war zone suffers from post-traumatic stress (or PTSD), but were there cases of mental distress linked to war events already in the first and second world wars, even if called by different names? Was it more often associated with the military or are there also traces of civilians in the archives?

In the documentation of Ljubljana as well as in that of Trieste there are many cases of the so-called shell shock, combat shock. The trench warfare caused many traumas to infantrymen and officers and many of them were treated in military hospitals. For this reason, in the psychiatric documentation we find a minimal part of the cases treated by psychiatrists from Trieste and Ljubljana.

More numerous are the cases of women traumatized by air raids and by the presence of soldiers in their vicinity. The Second World War also left a strong trail of fear among the female population. Many women felt threatened by the choices made by their loved ones, they were traumatized by the devastation, especially by the bombings, but also by the incursions of German and Italian soldiers, as well as by the partisans. Many mothers were unable to process the mourning for their children killed by the Germans or deported to Nazi concentration camps and so on. A world of suffering, turmoil and disease that affected members of all classes both in rural and urban areas.

In a recent meeting at the festival isHistory held in Gorizia, mentioned a possible continuation of this research on mental health and wars in the former Yugoslavia: can you tell us something more?

It would certainly be interesting to have the psychiatric sources of the nineties available to better understand the consequences of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, not only among the population that was involved in the war conflict in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia and then in Kosovo, but also in that part of the former Yugoslavia where the war conflict was less devastating. For privacy reasons, however, it is not possible to obtain them.

However, from various clues one can intuit the emotional upheaval that many have experienced in their subjectivity and in silence. The community projected towards the future, interested in establishing itself as an independent nation, chasing a neoliberal market economy has left the weak on its margins, those who were not able to adapt to the new value system. Just think of all those who lost their jobs in the transition period and especially those who found themselves without citizenship and therefore without the minimum civil rights from the 1990s onwards. The story of the "erased" who lost all legal status as citizens in independent Slovenia is only one of these shameful pages that occurred after the dissolution of Yugoslavia (the story is also told in Miha Mazzini's book, “I cancellati”, BEEE2018(Editor's note)These were people who did not immediately opt for Slovenian citizenship and remained legally suspended for years, without a homeland, without documents and without rights.

(Among the latest publications by Marta Verginella: Women and Borders, Manifestolibri 2021; Slovenka. The first Slovenian women's newspaper 1897-1902, Vita Activa 2019; The border of others(Donzelli 2008)

Interview by Sara Urbani, a graduate in natural sciences with a master's degree in science communication, works for the publishing house Zanichelli and is the author of Odòs – libreria editrice and the online magazines La Falla and La ricerca. 

Source: EastJournal – 22/10/2021