ABOUT
|
Taja Kramberger (1970) is a writer, poet and translator, and also an independent researcher in modern history and historical anthropology (various chapters and topics from the Central-European history between 18th and 20th Centuries).
Before moving from Slovenia to France in late 2012 − after a sudden illicit university purge of critical intellectuals in 2010 at the Faculty of Humanities of the University in Littoral in Koper (15 km from Trieste, on the Slovene side), followed by further enhanced social pressures on her and her husband after the purge, she was a visible Slovene university teacher and researcher, and an internationally renowned poet, writer, editor and translator (20 books, some 100 other literary publications). She was a member of the SWU−Slovene Writers’ Union (1996-2014, she stepped out of the SWU in protest against corrupted and illicit policy of its power structure in December 2014, but her open letter was denied by all the Slovene media and suppressed even by the President of the SWU, Mr. Ivo Svetina), of the Executive Council of the Academic Trade Union at the University of Littoral, and a president of cultural events (2007-2009) at the Faculty of Humanities in Koper. After the purge, in 2012, the Slovene PEN Club refuted her candidature while some of the executors of the illicit and brutal university purge and their allies were welcomed and quickly promoted. In the domain of literature she has published some 20 books; among them 10 books of her own poetry, 7 books of translation of other authors (prose and poetry), a book for kids and a theater play. She has been invited to many international literary meetings and festivals around the world, and her poems are included in a few dozen anthologies. She also conducted, organized or coordinated more than 150 cultural and literary events, national and international, in her “native country”. In the domain of human and social sciences, she has published four books and many dozen articles, translated more than a thousand pages of basic texts in SSH (into Slovenian), and made public around 200 other shorter texts. For ten years, she was Editor-in-Chief of a historical-anthropological journal Monitor ZSA (38 numbers, 2001-2010). She was actively engaged in struggles for social justice in Slovenia. After 2010 (university purge in Koper) she was totally degraded and her works were prevented from citing in Slovenia. There she refused to follow the newly invented parameters of “business university,” she openly refuted total submission to the “new” anti-intellectual “elite,” and she never adopted a foisted conception of literature as a media promoted production of commodities, or only as a tool for vertical mobility. The anathema and debasement of her (via lies and detractions on the national and international level) is not over yet, though she now lives in France. Too many visible international “intellectuals” let themselves be tricked by the “small, beautiful and young country” and its comfortable “intellectuals,” almost inevitably (as the country is so small) simultaneously the oppressors of the few honest and fair ones, today chased from the important positions if not from the country. Thus, behind the surface in Slovenia hides a normalized form of provincial fascism (it has never been anything else there), especially visceral against its own inner intellectual and creative forces. Those are permanently replaced by the regime-baptized, obedient and well camouflaged surrogates. It is a country of normalized purges in almost every sphere of production. Do not trust anybody officially promoted from there (check out by yourself, not by the quantity of voices in the frames of the provincial Gleichschaltung - here the power structure wins in advance anyway, but investigate their discourses and their relation to their real actions inside the country, check out their accelerated careers, their dissimulations, their networks, and their bank accounts). In 2015/2016, Taja Kramberger got the financial aid in Paris and visited many European archives of the Second World War. Currently, she analyses accumulated materials and writes texts about the OZAK during the Nazi occupation (1943-1945). She lives and works in France, together with her husband, a retired university professor Drago Braco Rotar, and attends some of the seminars in Paris. Drago Braco Rotar was also an important public intellectual in Slovenia, a founder of many important Slovene institutions and pioneer research fields, before he was ultimately debased as a critical intellectual between 2010 and 2012. At that time, the methodical eroding of his name, works and merits began to be visceral (done mostly by his past colleagues, who in the right and opportune moment took over his works, and institutions, and then openly lied about their real engagements in the past). Otherwise, Taja Kramberger and Drago Braco Rotar were much loved university teachers in Koper and have collaborated as a strong intellectual team/couple in many inspiring social and intellectual projects (research, writing, literature, culture, editorship, translation, social justice, organization, etc.) now for two decades. |
|
