Alenka Puhar

Alenka Puhar (b. February 4, 1945) is a Slovenian journalist, author, translator, and historian. She is famous for her columns in the Slovenian journal "Delo", for her writings on the dissident movements in the Communist Slovenia and Yugoslavia, and for her works on the social history of childhood in the Slovene Lands.

Biography

Alenka Puhar was born in Ljubljana. She is the older sister of Gregor Tomc, prominent sociologist and punk rock musician. After finishing her studies at the University of Ljubljana, she started working as a journalist for the daily newspaper "Delo", then the most widespread newspaper in Slovenia. In the 1970s, she started frequenting the intellectual circles of younger Slovenian dissidents, which included author Drago Jančar, philosophers Spomenka Hribar and Tine Hribar, publicist and author Viktor Blažič and others. In the 1980s, she became an active member of several civil society movements that challanged the official policies of the Communist regime. In 1983, she was among the signers of a petition demanding the abolition of death penalty in Yugoslavia. Next year, she organized a petition of solidarity with Serbian intellectuals that were trialed in Belgrade for opposing the government policies. She became one of the co-editors of the alternative journal "Nova revija". During the JBTZ-trial in 1988, when four Slovenian journalist were arrested by the Yugoslav People's Army and accused of revealing military secrets, she was elected on the board of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights. The Committee organized the first free mass demonstration in Slovenia after 1945, held in May 1988 on the central Congress Square of Ljubljana.

She was active in several civil activities throughout the Slovenian Spring, a process of political democratization between 1988 and 1992, which led to the independence of Slovenia in 1991. Afterwards, Puhar returned to journalist work and started writing extensively on the history of Slovenian and Yugoslav dissidents between 1945 and 1990.

Work

Alenka Puhar first gained recognition as a translator. In 1967 her translation of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was published by a major publisher in Ljubljana: it was one of the first official editions of the novel in any of the Communist countries. She also translated works by Gore Vidal, Frederick Forsyth and Wole Soyinka to Slovene.

In 1982, she published the book "Prvotno besedilo življenja" ("The Primary Text of Life"). The book, the title of which is taken from one of Ivan Cankar's short stories, was a combination of psychohistory and social history, in which she analyzed the condition of children in the Slovene Lands in the 19th century. The book raised delicate issues of sexual abuse, child abuse, and psychological terror in traditional Slovene rural society. It also produced a thorough psychological analyses of the texts of some major Slovene authors of the 19th and early 20th century, such as Josip Jurčič and Prežihov Voranc, and their representation of childhood. The book could not find a publisher in Slovenia and was issued in Zagreb. When it was published, it raised a controversy, in which Puhar was accused of portraying the history of Slovenian family life in a terrible light. The prominent Slovenian sociologist of family Katja Boh however publicly praised Puhar's book.

In 2004, Puhar edited and published the memories of Angela Vode, one of the major activists of the femminist movement in Slovenia in the 1920s and 1930s who was condemned in the so-called Nagode trial, a show trial staged by the Communist regime in 1947. In 2007, she was one of the authors of the volume "Pozabljena polivoca" ("The Forgotten Half"), a comprehensive overview of notable Slovene women of the 20th century, edited by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Sources

* [http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/2?id=15&highlight=alenka%20puhar Slovenska pomlad. (A webpage on the Slovenian Spring, run by the National Museum of Modern History in Ljubljana)]

External links

* [http://www.psychohistory.com/yugoslav/yugoslav.htm Alenka Puhar's article in Psychohistory on Yugoslav Childhood]
*worldcat id|lccn-no2003-121597