"The Generation at a Closed Door": Slovenian Intellectual Issues between the Two World Wars.

An article with the telling title "The Generation at a Closed Door" ("Generacija pred zaprtimi vrati")l was written in 1937 by the young writer and literary critic, Ivo Bmcic (1912-43). Having secured his first job (as a teacher's assistant in a primary school) five years after graduating in Slavic studies from Ljubljana University in 1935, Bmcic describes the dead-end position of his entire generation in Yugoslavia, as well as in a large part of Europe at that time. Following the Depression, the value of intellectual work fell dramatically in comparison with that of physical work, and the number of jobless people with university degrees started growing rapidly. Bmcic wrote about more than 150 unemployed college professors and of several hundred teachers; he cited no information on the number of unemployed professional college graduates lawyers, doctors, and engineers in Slovenia. At the time this represented an unemployment rate of over 20% among potential teachers and professors, and of all these educated young people, each year only around 10% of those seeking jobs were thought to have found suitable employment. 2