“You are nothing; you are less than the stench of Bohinj shit!”

The insult to honour and defamation in the years 1937 – 1950

Abstract

The article deals with insult to honour before, during and after the Second World War. It is restricted to the court circuits of Kranjska gora and Radovljica and the court circuit of Jesenice that was (temporarily) united after the war; the article is based on the files of the competent courts. The high number of lawsuits shows that litigation because of honour was common in the pre-war period. During the war, as expected, people had less time for these issues; immediately after the war, however, the percentage of litigations because of injured honour rose once again. The majority of the charges regarding insult to honour were connected with sexuality; among the defamation charges, larceny was the most common. Insult of the authorities and the state soon grew from insult and defamation to violation of public law and order, which is why the article only features “milder” cases. The cases with a political background represent a special category because they provide evidence of the most current contemporary issues. Before the war, for example, “political” insults commonly occurred during overheated electoral campaign events. After the war, when political life gradually died away, insults with a political basis turned into a direct attack on the authorities. The war period and the events related to it left many traces on people and their mutual relationships, which also manifested itself in reproaches and insults. Insults and defamations on the basis of wartime loyalties became an important category of accusations. In this respect it needs to be pointed out that, in the first few years after the war, court verdicts were often obviously in line with the “spirit of the time”. Comparison between the sexes shows us that men sued more often than women before the war; men were sued many more times because of insult to honour. After the war, unlike in the pre-war times, women defended their honour before the court more often; at the same time, the number of women who were sued because of insult to honour and defamation became similar to that of men.