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.The other image is of a visitor to a war-ravaged village; as he watches,life gradually begins returning to the ashes and scorched stones.This111 provides an epiphany to the observer.When Kocbek writes I grow larger,/become a giant,/ now I see over/ the shoulder of all horror, 40 he hastriumphed over the pain of witnessing the destruction around him andrisen above the political squabbles that occasioned the atrocity.He doesnot identify the perpetrators, but he knows what motivates them and what111 is greater than they are. 104 The breakup of Yugoslavia1 When Edvard Kocbek was born on September 27, 1904, in Sveti Jurijob `%0Å„avnici (today known as Videm ob `%0Å„avnici), a village in Prekmurje,Slovenia was still part of the Habsburg Empire.His father was an organistand church sexton.Kocbek himself was a voracious reader as a boy, sailedthrough elementary school, and was sent to the large nearby city of Mariborto study at the classical gimnazija (lycée).His high school studies there andelsewhere lasted for a total of six years, and then from 1925 to 1927 hestudied theology at the Roman Catholic seminary in Maribor.At thispoint Kocbek intended to become a priest, but in 1927 he suddenly broke1 off his studies and returned home.Apparently, he had realized he couldserve his fellow man better from outside the church than from within, but there may have been personal reasons for leaving, too.411 Kocbek then moved to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and enrolledin the University there as a student of Romance languages and literatures.It was at this time that he also began his activism in the intellectual circlesof the liberal Catholic youth movement; he became editor of the journalKri~ (The Cross).Between 1928 and 1932, Kocbek studied abroad, forbrief periods, in Berlin, Lyons, and Paris.He met, and subsequently main-tained correspondence with, numerous West European writers and11 philosophers.During this time his essays and translations were publishedback home in Yugoslavia, many of them in the Catholic journal Dom insvet (Home and the World); they introduced Slovenes to the ideas ofChristian existentialism and also to the works of Catholic writers such asEngland s G.K.Chesterton (1874 1936) and France s Paul Claudel(1868 1955).42Kocbek graduated from university in Ljubljana in 1930 and then wentto teach French in next-door Croatia.For six years, the Yugoslav author-ities sought to keep him on ice by posting him at schools in Croatia,outside of his home republic, in order to sever his ties to other Slovene11 intellectuals and activists.In this period he published his first collection ofverse, the highly acclaimed Zemlja (The Land).By turns Dionysian, psalm-like, and bucolic,43 this collection made an enormous splash.Most critics,across the political spectrum, were enchanted by the collection.Evencommentators to Kocbek s left, who called (unfavorable) attention to hisoverly abstract religious concerns and to his artizem (a stylistic attitudeof art-for-art s sake ), joined in the praise that this poetry representeda new synthesis of form and philosophy and as such was a milestone inSlovene art; Kocbek s mixture of existentialist, expressionist, and personalistpoetry was called metaphysical (bistvogledni) realism.4411 After returning to Ljubljana to teach in 1936, he met many prominentSlovene communists (including Tito s close associate, Edvard Kardelj, andthe economist Boris Kidri%0Å„) and published articles on Marxist Christianrelations; Kocbek consistently stated throughout his whole life that heagreed with the goals of the Yugoslav communists but not their methods.4511 It was then that one of his essays ignited a major controversy, resulting The breakup of Yugoslavia 10511 in the authoritarian and very conservative Yugoslav government shut-ting down Dom in svet for a year.This article, Thoughts about Spain ( Premialjevanjeo`paniji ) published in 1937, condemned General FranciscoFranco s rebellion in Spain; it also condemned fascism in general, criti-cized the smugness and self-interest of bourgeois (middle-class ) Christians,and called upon Slovene Catholics to support the beleaguered governmentof the Spanish Republic.Catholics and conservatives around Europe andthe world supported Franco because of his anti-communism and his tiesto the Church and landed aristocracy.Kocbek then continued publishing11 in a new journal he founded, Dejanje (Action), from 1938 to 1941.When the Germans and Italians invaded and carved up Yugoslavia inApril 1941, many Slovenes went into hiding in cities or in the country-11 side, where they eventually formed armed units to fight the Axis forcesand also their Slovene collaborators, called Whites or Domobranci (Defendersof the homeland).This phenomenon was repeated across Yugoslavia, withmany groups of varying political stripes taking up arms against the invadersand, ultimately, each other.In 1942 Kocbek went into the undergroundhimself
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