Labour migration/mobility around the break-up of the Habsburg monarchy on the land and sea: negotiating lifeforms, status, legal language and concepts

After the fin de siecle and the breakup of Austria-Hungary, Slovene ethnic territory was going through tremendous changes. Some sought a better future by travelling to the promised land across the Atlantic with steamship lines, hoping that immigration quotas would still permit them to enter the United States. Some Slovenes and Jews were facing the persecution under the Italian fascist regime or the germanisation pressure from the Austrian authorities and had to seek refuge (as well as labour) in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where they were welcomed by a slight cultural shock, or had to travel to the United States or even Palestine. But not all of them left - some South Slavs were lucky enough to hold on to their identities and survive the pressure from the Italian fascists and participate as highly qualified musicians in a newly founded philharmonic orchestra after the Second World War, which was a unique form of labour. 

Throughout our endeavours we have faced and tried to overcome quite a few challenges in the role of researchers. Our core guidelines for picking individual subtopics were related to migration flows on the axis of Trieste – Ljubljana – Maribor, roughly in the period encompassing events before First World War and until the end of the Second World War. The rationale behind it was to research Trieste as a window in to the world and Ljubljana and Maribor as important crossroads of migration flows not only for Slovenes, but also for Central Europe. 

Nevertheless, every student was free to choose his or her subtopics. Thus, Luka, Kristjan and Flora chose to focus their research on Trieste alone, as they have researched the topics of Jewish migration through Trieste, contractual relations between steamship companies and the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and the migration of Triestine Symphonic Orchestra, respectively. Ajra focused on the sailors in the Yugoslav Merchant and Royal Navies, while Aljoša chose to dig into the effects of labour migration on the standardisation of language in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Lovro and Vid were fascinated by the trips the Slovenes (and other Southern Slavs) made to the United States and therefore focused on the migration and status of straw-hat-making young women (slamnikarice) and the perception of the identity of Southern Slavs by the notorious Dillingham Commission in the United States. 

During our research, we have identified and successfully pursued several sources of archival documents and literature. First and foremost, we were lucky to have established a very productive relationship with prof. dr. Aleksij Kalc from the Slovenian Migration Institute, an integral part of the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts https://isim.zrc-sazu.si/en/sodelavci/aleksej-kalc-en, who helped us with crystallisation of our questions at our very productive meetings and provided us with valuable input regarding secondary sources. We were also thrilled to conduct several trips to the Triestine archives and the archives of the Slovene National Study Library https://www.knjiznica.it/it/

 within the Primorski vestnik newspaper, where we had to combat the barrier of Italian language. In this and especially in the matter of the rich material, they are the guardians of, Ms Gabriela Caharija offered us her attentive and kind help  On our research paths, we encountered also quite a few dead ends Luka thus turned out to be unlucky in pursuing primary sources at the Triestine Jewish Museum, as they have all been shipped to Israel in the past few years. Moreover, some of us haven't even found any relevant archival sources in Trieste and had to recentre our endeavours towards the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana. Finally, we are also very grateful for all of the invaluable support from dr. Danijel Grafenauer and dr. Janez Pirc from Institute for Ethnic Studies, who provided us with information regarding literature and important input on our findings and conclusions during our visit at the Institute in Ljubljana as well as during their attendance of the Peak Event of which more in the continuation.

The so called Peak Event was an important milestone on our way towards the end of our research endeavours this year, as well.  Following the first one in Paris last year, this time it was us, who hosted it at our Faculty in Ljubljana. We would like to point out, that as we had listened to the presentations of our colleagues, several questions regarding our own topics and possible collaborations came across our minds, since quite a few parallels between the topics could have been drawn, which in our mind was the closest we came this year in the desired cross-national learning community experience.

Last but not least, we have to talk briefly about core concepts upon which we based our research. While the keyword of this year’s umbrella topic is Labour Migration, we also came across the related notion of »mobility« while reading the book entitled On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Tranatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire by Anne-Marie Steidl (Purdue UP, 2020), who explains that the notion of »migration« can – and in her mind indeed it should - be understood as narrower than that of the »mobility«. Namely, migration is often used to describe (in principle permanent) movement of individuals from one nation-state to another, while the notion of mobility should encopass any kind of movement of individuals, regardless of its duration and destination. In our research, we use both concepts, however, we understand the concept of migration to be narrower than the concept of mobility. 

Lots of questions which have been raised during our research remain unanswered – thus, we welcome you to familiarise yourself with them and think about possible answers to them in the presentation below.

 

 - Lovro Čeh Brežnik, Luka Držić, Flora Hawlina, Aljoša Kalacanović, Kristjan Krapež, Vid Lobnik and Ajra Šišernik