Tamara Griesser Pečar


Tamara Griesser Pečar is a Slovenian historian.

Early life and education

She was born in Ljubljana, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She attended high school in Ljubljana, Koper and Portorož and later in New York City and in Vienna. After graduating from the American International School of Vienna, she studied history at the American University of Paris and later history and English at the University of Vienna, where she obtained her PhD in 1973 with a dissertation on the positions of the Slovenian autonomous government towards Carinthia and Carinthian Slovenes between 1918 and 1920.

Literary career

She has written on the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, on the position of the Roman Catholic Church in Communist Slovenia and on the period of World War II in Slovenia. In 2003, she published a book in German entitled "The Divided Nation. Slovenia 1941–1945: Occupation, Collaboration, Civil War and Revolution". The Slovene translation was published in 2006 by the publishing house Mladinska knjiga, becoming a bestseller.
In 2004, she was awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice order by Pope John Paul II.