Strom beze jména – Jančar Drago (2020)

The novel by prominent Slovenian author Drago Jančar (*1948) tells the story of archivist Janez Lipnik, who, through historical testimonies, returns to his own past and to the traumatic events of modern Slovenian history. The first trigger for these memories is the memoirs of officer and erotomaniac Aleksij Grgurević, whose international 'Don Juan' career began during World War II in Slovenia. The second trigger is the memoirs of a simple cleaner, Ivanka K., from the psychiatric hospital Studenec.

Through his diligent research in the archive, Janez Lipnik supplements historical information and learns that even teacher Zala, his post-war childhood love, was not unknown to the militia member Aleksij Grgurević. The explicitness of the archival materials, combined with Lipnik's vivid imagination, forms the axis of the novel, around which his family's fates (his father Anton Lipnik survived the Auschwitz concentration camp) intertwine with the tragic fate of divided Slovenes fighting against each other during World War II, as well as with the war conflict in the 1990s.