Borderland Between Hitler and Mussolini: Val Canale Italy, Austria Yugoslavia

This is a book about a few short years in that valley - the years of the Second World War - but to understand them one must first understand the ground on which they were played out. For the war did not come to the Val Canale as it came to Warsaw or Rotterdam, out of a clear sky and against a single, settled nation. It came to a place that was already a seam between worlds, where Germanic, Slavic and Romance Europe had been rubbing against one another for two thousand years, and where the map had been redrawn so many times that the people who lived there had long since learned to distrust every new border pressed upon them. When Hitler and Mussolini, and then Hitler and Tito, reached into this valley, they were reaching into the most tangled ethnic knot in the Alps.But 1945 did not bring a simple return to the old order. As Tito and the new Yugoslavia emerged, the political map was transformed once again. Former borders disappeared, new ones were drawn, populations moved, loyalties were questioned and the meaning of being Italian, Slovenian, Austrian or Yugoslav changed with the political landscape.