Alenka Puhar

Alenka Puhar (born 4 February 1945) is a Slovenian journalist, author, translator, and historian. In 1982, she wrote a groundbreaking psychohistory-inspired book "The Primal Text of Life" (in Slovene: Prvotno besedilo življenja) about the 19th century social history of early childhood in Slovene Lands, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book was in 2010 the subject of a television documentary that was in 2010 televised on the national RTV Slovenija. Her grandfather was the photographer and inventor Janez Puhar, who invented a process for photography on glass.

Life Alenka Puhar was born in Črnomelj to father France Mihelič, Slovene modernist painter, and mother Helena Puhar, a renowned pedagogue (an elementary school in Kranj was named after her). She was born in a south-eastern area of Slovenia liberated then by Slovene partisans, which her parents were members of, during World War II. She never lived with her father because he was later married to a writer Mira Mihelič, albeit they have been keep in contact. She is the half-sister of Gregor Tomc, a notable sociologist and punk rock musician, who was born from Helena Puhar's later marriage. written by Alenka Puhar was published in Journal of Psychohistory a decade later in which she traced historical differences in early childhood between Slovenia and other more traditionalistic cultures, portraying individual and collective case studies, including Serbian traditionalistic ridiculing of Slovenia for not being as masculine as Serbia and analyzing what led Serbian traditionalistic men to rape 20000 to 50000 women during war in Bosnia.

In the 1980s, she became an active member of several civil society movements that challenged the official policies of the Titoist regime. In 1983, she was among the signers of a petition demanding the abolition of death penalty in Yugoslavia. Next year, she organized a petition of solidarity with Serbian intellectuals that were trialed in Belgrade for opposing the government policies. She became one of the co-editors of the alternative journal Nova revija. In 1987, she was among the co-founders of the Yugoslav section of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. During the JBTZ-trial in 1988, when four Slovenian journalist were arrested by the Yugoslav People's Army and accused of revealing military secrets, she was elected on the board of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, which soon became the biggest civil society platform in Yugoslavia, with more than 100,000 individual members. The Committee organized the first free mass demonstration in Slovenia after 1945, held in May 1988 on the central Congress Square of Ljubljana.

She was active in several civil activities throughout the Slovenian Spring, a process of political democratization between 1988 and 1990, which led to the independence of Slovenia in 1991. Afterwards, Puhar returned to journalist work and started writing extensively on the history of Slovenian and Yugoslav dissidents between 1945 and 1990. Since 1994, she is member of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), sponsored by the Council of Europe. She later described

Major works Prvotno besedilo življenja ("The Primary Text of Life". Zagreb: Globus, 1982); Peticije, pisma in tihotapski časi ("Petitions, Letters and Times of Smuggling". Maribor: Obzorja, 1985); Slovenski avtoportret 1918-1991 ("The Slovene Self-Portrait, 1918-1991. Ljubljana: Nova revija, 1992); Pozabljena polovica ("The Forgotten Half", co-edited with Marta Verginella et al.. Ljubljana: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts).