Sabine Rutar

Institut fuer soziale Bewegungen
Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum
Clemensstr. 17-19
44789 Bochum
Germany

email: sabine.rutar@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

fon: +49.(0)234.32-22541
fax: +49.(0)234.32-14249

private address:
Lohbergstr. 14
44789 Bochum

fon: +49.(0)234.2987747

Current Research
Arbeitseinsatz im jugoslawischen Bergbau während des Zweiten Weltkrieges.
Lokale Fallbeispiele im Vergleich: Serbien und Slowenien
Employment and Forced Labour in the Yugoslav Mining Industries During the Second World War: Comparative Case Studies in Serbia and Slovenia.
Based on four mining industries, two in Slovenia and two in Serbia, the comparative study will give insight into the employment relationships in Yugoslavia during the Second World War and the ways in which the war economy affected the lives of local mining populations. The comparison considers two different contexts of Geman occupation during the war: those parts of Slovenia that came under German civil administration; and those parts of Serbia under German military administration. The selection of specific mines has been conditioned by the economic relevance of the mining industries: copper (Bor/Serbia), lead and zinc (Trepca/Serbia, Mezica/Slovenia), as well as lignite (Trbovlje/Slovenia). The investigation will include the following aspects:

a)Strategies for survival of the workers within the range of the conflicting concepts and attitudes connected to resistance, forced labour, and collaboration;

b) Varieties of experience of both qualified and non-qualified miners as well as of prisoners of war and Jewish workers forced to work in the mines;

c) Ways in which mobility of the work force (migration, deportation, resettlements) affected the local society;

d) The influences of national and racial categories on living and working conditions;

e) The extent to which war mobilization contributed to or impeded modernization processes

Ph.D. Thesis, European University Institute, 2001

Kulturelle Praxis im multinationalen sozialdemokratischen Milieu in Triest vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Essen: Klartext, 2003 (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, Schriftenreihe A - Darstellungen, Band 23)

Cultural Practice in the Multinational Socialdemocratic Milieu in Trieste Prior to the First World War

At the beginning of the 20th century Trieste evolved from a cosmopolitan merchant town dominated by Italian culture and language, into a bilingual, industrial city and Austria-Hungary's most important port. Old identities were no longer automatically valid and new identities had yet to be articulated and constructed. On the whole they were anchored by economic links to Austria, cultural links to Italy, and the emerging of Slovene national consciousness.
Sociability stands at the center of the investigation, that is the activities of social democratic educational associations, choral societies, theater and sports societies, associations for women and young people . Their activities give insight both into the dominant linguistic patterns, revealing social realities, and into the symbolic and ritual constructions of meaning within a multinational, politically defined urban setting.
The processes of nationalisation and class building are approached from this sociocultural viewpoint, key concepts of a world changing from primarily agrarian to industrial. The study seeks to contribute to a revised positioning of the history of workers' movements, to a better understanding of the history of East Central and South East European cities in the age of industrialization and urbanisation, as well as to the history of nationalism in multinational urban contexts.