Commentary in DELO on Stukelj
akobevc
by Alenka Puhar
Ljubljana, DELO, November 14, 1998
The apotheosis of Leon Stukelj, the eminent personality born one hundred
years ago in the small, charming and not yet quite modern Novo Mesto, has
in the recent decade grown to a tumultuous crescendo. The celebrations --
genuine as well as those with thinly disguised commercial messages -- which
have this week reached their climax will by its end have spent their sound
and fury, but not their persistence. The celebrity at the epicenter of all
this has long been referring to it all as a "circus" and if at one time this
might have seemed a metaphor it certainly seems to be such no longer.
Indeed, it is more or less a circus with a panoply of speeches and
promotional ingredients. The first man of the show is taking all this in
stride with a remarkable poise and equanimity. If he is pleased, he shows
reserve, if he is annoyed or bored, he shows restraint. To a question
probing his feelings he once replied:"Well, I would be hard put to criticize
all this, all I can say is - thank you."
Leon Stukelj is a gentleman of the old school for whom innate kindness
combined with acquired tactfulness dictates forbearance of criticism when
honors and gifts are showered upon him. Thus we can only conjecture that in
the resplendent orchestration of spectacular promotional events attendant to
his centennial birthday he is stirred by all kinds of things that are not
near his heart nor to his taste, and not in harmony with his aesthetic
disposition for lasting values, tradition and responsibility to himself and
to the world around him.
The portrait of Leon Stukelj emerging from all that is going on belongs to a
world of cartoons of sorts. The drawing, although recognizable, is reduced,
simplified, idealized, painted with simple pleasing colors. The resulting
pictures may be pleasing yet unrelated to the complexity of an unclear,
perhaps murky, background. We see a poster picture of a man, bright in
spirit and of sound health. As we follow his story, such as it unfolds to
the public view, we cannot but think: he is every mother's dream: good and
diligent, honest and kind, virtue incarnate. How happy would be Marija
Milner, married Stukelj, had she lived to see all this.
In the midst of all the fanfare, percussion and rolling drums, the entire
Slovenian community seeks to identify itself with his image. Thundering
crowds are milling around our hero, basking in the reflection of his glory,
hoping trustingly that they might share at least some of his fame. To be
sure, there is nothing strange about this. Celebrities are here for us to
identify with them and add a grain of their luster to our drab mediocrity,
our indolence and irresponsibility, our cowardice and stupidity, our
weakness and banality. How lovely it is to imagine in the midst of this
frustrated, querulous, and screaming throng that Leon Stukelj is the best
and most representative son of our micro cosmos, the quintessence of us all.
Yet the image with which we are so eagerly trying to identify ourselves is
very much reduced because...Perhaps it is best if in order to sustain our
theory we partition his lifespan in two parts and try to paint the portrait
of Leon Stukelj at his fiftieth birthday. What would we see?
The answer is simple and troublesome: we would get nothing. At his fiftieth
birthday Stukelj was totally unknown except perhaps to those very few people
who were close to him. At that time Leon Stukelj was an obscure person in
an obscure town amidst obscure people with a dark shadow over him and only
one ambition: survival, as inconspicuously as possible, invisibly, so to
speak, without a definite shape, color, scent or taste. As a nobody.
If someone did -- but there was no one who would -- nevertheless draw the
portrait of Leon Stukelj in his fifties, he would have to write about a
respectable, conscientious judge who had once devoted all his energy to the
people in quest of justice. He would have to write about a separated
officer who had seen the defeat of his army, a man who got his wife and
daughter out of the town occupied by the Germans to a town occupied by the
Italians. He would have to write about a man firmly attached to the values
of legality and patriotism who had distanced himself from the ideological
aggression and violence and lived with his head tucked between his
shoulders. He would have to take his stand with respect to those who because
of this considered him to be a traitor, a blue guard [Yugoslav patriot] and
collaborator and hastened to accuse him. It would be hard to overlook the
extremely negative dossier ["karakteristika" which the Slovenian communist
dominated government to this day maintains on every person], compiled on
account of his views, he could use the quotes from the interrogation
conducted by one of the leading members of the Slovenian political police
[Sergej Krajger], a lawyer of sorts and a foremost star of the rising
revolutionary justice.
The portrait would have to continue with the description of the
investigation followed by what in the days after the so-called liberation
was called a trial. The trial ended in acquittal yet the man who is feted
today lost the right to practice his profession. He became a relative of
Josef K [a personlality in a novel of Franz Kafka ].
This portrait would not come even close to the infantile comics drawn
today. It would require a master of sharp, impressionist graphics.
Leon Stukelj spent the time around his fiftieth birthday as an unemployed,
unemployable, impoverished and repressed middle aged man. Having no right to
ration cards with which to buy food and other necessities he was reduced to
eke out a living by picking up surreptitious jobs occasionally provided by
friends who were still authorized to ply the legal trade. According to the
pronouncement of the movers and shakers of those days, he belonged to the
class of problematic Philistines, the reaction, rotten core of the bygone
old world. He was probably tolerated only because of the magic of his
Olympic achievements.
Finally he secured the right to work as a low-grade commercial analyst. He
was allowed to sit in a threadbare jacket and worn out slacks solving the
problems of small businesses that were not too much in the way of the
five-year plan. He was allowed to sit in on the indoctrination lectures and
meetings devoted to the new reality and the emerging New Order and hear all
about how glorious was the time in which we lived. Somewhere between his
fiftieth and sixtieth birthday his portrait could be suitably drawn by Franz
Kafka. A man who could draw a meaningful picture against the background of
the dreary, lugubrious Maribor, from its forlorn streets and alleys twisting
around monotonously from the melancholy of Mondays to the despair of
Tuesdays.
For Leon Stukelj is a national hero who spent one third of his life in grey,
colorless and nondescript anonymity. A man without anything special, as
Robert Musil would put it.
It was the new, post World War II generation, that detected in him
attributes which might be worthy of being retrieved from oblivion and
discovered the medals, attesting to achievements of long time ago, that
should be dusted off. Fortunately there was support to this in physical
fitness, in the constitution of his muscle, his body, coordination of his
movements and clarity of his mind. At the same time, this generation knew
how to artfully dodge the embarrassing questions, such as his commitment to
the Sokol organization and his ascetic but freedom loving patriotic
feelings.
All this spectacle around Leon Stukelj, written for the grand orchestra with
a horde of trombones and percussion is skillfully drowning anything that
must perforce be only articulated sotto voce.
And so we have what is now unfolding before us. A lifetime of one hundred
years disjoint with selective amnesia. With careful editing out of anything
that could disturb one's sleep and tranquility. A reduction of this
upstanding man who once was a gymnastics champion at the Olympics and who
can still flawlessly perform the basic elements of gymnastics. Why should we
rack our brain by worrying about an unfortunate tumble that has in the
meantime befallen our jurisprudence and its judges? Why indeed should we be
worrying about the intellectual implications of this life of one hundred
years?
Indeed, only a bizarre and outlandish mind can in the midst of all these
celebrations raise the question as to why are we honoring Leon Stukelj by
staging a symposium on the physical fitness of the aged but would have
nothing to do with, say, a symposium on the fate of a jurist on the sunny
side of the Alps.
Of necessity my closing chords must be muted because all the pomp and
circumstance hardly allows a hint of humanity in the interesting, dynamic,
but also poignant life story of Leon Stukelj.
Sabina Brvar-Ivancic
>LEON STUKELJ -- Portrait of the Week
For once, Vlado, thank you very much for this article. I cannot but agree
with the author.