Early life
Kocbek was born in the village of Sveti Jurij ob ??avnici, Styria, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the son of an organist. After school he went to a Roman Catholic seminary in Maribor. After two years, he quit and enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied French language and literature. During his college years, he joined a group of young Christian socialists who wanted to continue the legacy of both the Slovene Christian socialist political activist and thinker Janez Evangelist Krek, and the Social democratic author Ivan Cankar. The group became known as the "Crusaders" (in Slovene: kri?arji), after their journal Kri? na gori ("Cross on the Mountain").
He started to write while at university, at first mostly poems and short essays. After finishing his studies, he taught at elementary schools in Vara?din and Bjelovar in Croatia. In 1935, he married a Croat woman from Vara?din, Zdravka Koprivnjak.
In 1934, he received a scholarship to study in Paris. There, he met with the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier who introduced him to the personalist philosophy. For the rest of his life, Kocbek would maintain contacts with the circle around the French magazine Esprit, with which he felt the strongest intellectual affinity. Throughout his life, Kocbek maintained contacts with several French Christian left thinkers, most notably with the writer Jean-Marie Domenach.
After leaving Paris, Kocbek made a prolongued stay in Berlin, where he established contacts with the local leftist, especially Marxist subculure. Upon returning to Yugoslavia, he published his first collection of poems, Zemlja (Soil), a hymnical and modernist hommage to the stillness of the rural life.
In 1936, he returned to Slovenia, where he was employed as professor of French language at the prestigious Be?igrad Grammar School.
Political engagement
In 1937, Kocbek wrote an article called "Reflections on Spain" (Premi?ljevanje o ?paniji), in which he attacked the Spanish clergy who supported the pro-Fascist forces of general Francisco Franco in the Spanish civil war. The article, published in the liberal Catholic magazine Dom in svet, caused a scandal among Slovene Catholics, which reached its height by the condemnation of Kocbek's positions by the bishop of Ljubljana Gregorij Ro?man. As a consequence, Kocbek became the referential figure on the Christian left in Slovenia.
Between 1938 and 1941, Kocbek grew closer both to Communist positions and the left liberal intellectuals around the journals Sodobnost and Ljubljanski zvon, in an attempt to establish a Popular front against the Fascist threat. Shortly after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Kocbek was among the founders of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People. After several months in underground during the Italian occupation, Kocbek joined the Partisan forces. In 1943, he agreed to dissolve the Christian Socialist group within the Liberation Front and recognized the absolute primacy of the Communist Party of Slovenia within the resistance movement.
Just before the end of World War Two, he was nominated as Minister for Slovenia in the interim Yugoslav government led by Josip Broz Tito. After the end of the war, he continued was given several other functions within the new Communist regime, all of them without any real power.
Removal from public life
In 1951, Kocbek published a volume of short stories, entitled "Fear and Courage" (Strah in pogum), in which he touched the issue of moral dilemmas in the Partisan fight during World War Two. The Communist regime used the book as an excuse to launch a massive propaganda attack on his person, forcing him to completely withdraw to private life in 1952, placing him under surveillance until the end of his life. In the next decade, he was not allowed to appear in public, let alone publish his books or essays. During this time, he earned his living by translating. Among others, he translated works by Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Max Frisch.
In the years of his isolation, Kocbek turned almost exclusively to poetry, where he explored philosophical and ethical issues in a modernist style. After 1964, Kocbek was allowed some more public appearance, and many of his poems were allowed to be published for the first time after 1952. His later modernist poetry became an important source of inspiration for the young generations of Slovene authors, including such leading figures like Dominik Smole, Jo?e Snoj, Toma? ?alamun, Marjan Ro?anc and many others.
Last years
In 1975, the Slovene language magazine Zaliv ("The Bay") from Trieste, edited by Kocbek's friends Boris Pahor and Alojz Rebula, published an interview with Kocbek. In the interview, Kocbek condemned the mass summary killings of 12,000 Slovene anti-Communist militiamen (members of the collaborationist Slovene Home Guard), perpetrated by the Communists after the end of World War Two. As a consequence, the Communist regime launched another massive denigration campaign against him. The international pressure on Yugoslavia, especially the intervention of the German writer Heinrich Böll, was most probably the main element that protected Kocbek from judicial prosecution. He died in Ljubljana in 1981, and was buried in the ?ale cemetery.
Persecuted figure
After his removal from public life in 1952, Kocbek was under constant surveillance of the Yugoslav Secret Police, the UDBA. His personal file (under the number 584), written from 1944 to 1981, has 4,268 pages of reports. Sixty nine secret police officials followed Kocbek between 1952 and 1981. Many of Kocbek's close friends were hired by the police to spy in him: the most reports were written by the essayist Jo?e Javor?ek.
In 1976, two of his closest friends, Viktor Bla?i? and Franc Miklav?i?, were arrested and trialed for belonging to "Kocbek's secret circle". Kocbek himself was however never arrested, although he was interrogated by the secret police several times. Several of his personal files were stolen and were never recovered, and his apartment was wired. In the mid 1970s, during a renovation of their apartment, Kocbek's son Jurij Kocbek discovered a microphone hidden in the wall. Kocbek wrote a famous poem for the occasion, entitled A Microphone in the Wall (Mikrofon v zidu), in which he poetically juxtaposed technology to human activity.
Personal life
Kocbek was married and had two sons, the poet Matja? Kocbek and photographer Jurij Kocbek. Besides Slovene, he was fluent in German, French, and Serbo-Croatian. He also spoke Italian.
