Legacies of the Second World War in Croatian

Women and War

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Legacies of the Second World War in Croatian Cultural Memory Women as Seen through the Media Renata Jambrešic´ Kirin and Reana Senjkovic´

ABSTRACT This article shows how the model of the ideal patriotic woman, established through propaganda activities between two competitive ideologies in Croatia during the Second World War, have been transformed and adapted to accommodate diverse genres of memory culture from 1945 until the present day. In order to indicate the interrelation of media-ideological constructs and self-definition, the authors have compared cultural representation models of ‘acceptable’ and ‘obnoxious’ females in war time with ethnographical interviews conducted with women at the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Antifašistički front žena (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front, AFŽ) Istrian Conference in 2004. The contrast between recollections and culturally constructed official memory shows how the memories of women, as autonomous historical subjects, resist the imposed collective amnesia on the anti-fascist movement, although these women also leave many ‘unsuitable truths’ untold about their subordinate role within the anti-fascist movement. KEYWORDS: Croatia, Second World War, Antifašistički front žena (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front, AFŽ), cultural memory, war propaganda, gender, television

p Introduction1 This article focuses on the different versions of hegemonic constructs of womanhood as represented in various forms of mass media in Croatia from the beginning of the Second World War to the present day. Our analysis is guided by George Steiner’s assumption that not history as such, but images of history, rule us because ‘symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility’.2 This assumption is also affirmed by feminist historians who question the naturalness of gender identities and emphasise the importance of cultural repre-

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Volume 4, 2010: 71–96 doi:10.3167/asp.2010.040105

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RENATA JAMBRESˇ IC´ KIRIN AND REANA SENJKOVIC´

sentations that convey the meanings of male and female as historically variable. Thus, over time the silenced ‘herstories’ about women’s experiences of the Second World War have been replaced by suggestive popular images of ‘new women’, blurring the difference between the lived, individual and collective cultural memory. In addition, although it is a fact that ‘female voices have been largely omi ed from official histories’, nonetheless, ‘wartime experiences challenging traditional gender roles’ have remained a mythic cornerstone, authenticating active, socially relevant and potentially subversive female identities that, more or less successfully, resisted the stereotyping imposed by media texts in both socialist and western popular culture.3 Our selection of the period covered by media texts analysed here comes from the observation of the durability of media representations of desirable womanhoods among two competing ideologies conceived and designed for propaganda purposes during the Second World War: the then-ruling Ustasha’s Nezavisna država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia, herea er the NDH), an active collaborator with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; and the Partisan Movement of the Komunistička partĳa Jugoslavĳe (Communist Party of Yugoslavia, herea er the KPJ), victorious a er the war.4 The former interpreted the issue of female co-operation ‘in terms of the struggle for the survival of the nation’, while the la er mobilised women in the republican tradition as responsible and self-reliant female citizens participating in the establishment of a just social order which, along with the core principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité, also advocated female emancipation. The symbolic components of the national patriarchal and the republican woman, however, were not clearly separated, which led to their parallel existence and interweaving also in the discourse of the socialist period. Subsequently, the five-year period of the Yugoslav Wars (1991–1995) le a crucial mark on the transition from the one-party socialist state to a multi-party system in terms of gender roles. The forceful mobilisation of two referential imaginaries contributed to historical revisionism and the ‘re-traditionalisation’ of society. This trend has only faltered and so ened recently through the completely unexpected genre of a domestic television soap-opera the action of which is set in the 1940s, and once again represents the Partisans as positive characters, exemplary models of ideological activity and guerrilla warfare. The three formative historical periods that we consider here are those of the Second World War (1941–1945), post-war Yugoslavia (1945–1990) and independent Croatia (1990–present). For the first period we relied primarily on periodicals printed by the Ustasha and Partisan movements. From the period of Yugoslav socialism, in addition to journalism and memoirs, we also analysed several television films and series, selected according to their popularity and influence on social memory.5 From the post1990 period we have singled out two particularly relevant examples for comparative purposes: the film and television series, ‘Četverored, priča o Bleiburgu’ (Files of four, the story of Bleiburg), and the domestic television soap opera, ‘Ponos Ratkajevih’ (The pride of the Ratkaj family).6 Regarding the media representations of the above-mentioned hegemonic discourses about desirable womanhood, and exploring the modes in which those representations reduced, essentialised and stabilised the symbolic meaning of the historical roles of Croatian women in the second half of the twentieth century, it was necessary

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to omit many aspects of the political and social history that played a part in shaping gendered discourses, the subject of feminist history analyses.7 Our analysis implies diverse modes of reception of the media messages, in the sense of the model set by Stuart Hall, differentiating among (1) the dominant-hegemonic position of the ‘recipients’, which is nearest to ‘perfectly transparent communication’; (2) the negotiator position that only partly admits the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions; and (3) the opposition’s position within which the ‘conflict in the discourse’ takes place.8 Hall’s thesis was particularly potent a er the 1970s when the crystallised symbolic figures of socialist women ‘shock workers’ and traditional Catholic women opposed the first voices of domestic feminist criticism in the name of a ‘third’, disobedient, maladjusted and liberal womanhood. This was also the female type that the Ustasha and Partisan press during the Second World War had described as ‘superficial’ and ‘depraved’, full of ‘vanity and obtrusiveness’, and isolated in its inappropriate insistence on ‘independence’ and ‘financial self-reliance’.9 In order to gain insight into the subjective nature of war time experience and its representations, we will also analyse interviews we conducted with former female Partisans in the Croatian regions of Istria.10 Although it can only partially explore the interplay between cultural forms and self-definition (i.e., the extent to which lived experience is affected by the media construct of [masculinised] heroic war time reality), even this limited case-study offers insight into the ‘structure of feeling’ that characterised the Partisan Movement during the Second World War.11 Backed by the ideological dominance and the commemorative practices of the KPJ, this structure of feeling retained primacy in Yugoslav society until 1990 and, although marginalised, survived even a er the independence of Croatia.

The Media during the Second World War: ‘Educating the People’ Croatian women’s associations encountered the First World War with an ‘advanced degree of organisation’.12 Until the fall of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941, their activities were focused on ‘achieving women’s rights’, with suffrage as their primary objective. The colourful female activist community included upper-class women who devoted their spare time to philanthropy and who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the agile female intellectuals who edited the majority of women’s periodical publications. The vision of these progressive women was founded upon the assumption of the possibility of achieving ‘harmonious unification with man’, a goal toward which women would be led by their behaviour and presumed superior tolerance.13 In the period between the two world wars, the activities of the women who joined the workers’ movement were essentially defined, unlike the activities of urban feminists, by the inspiring nature of the ideology and the activity of the then-illegal KPJ, founded in 1919. They could not count on the a ention of the mass media.14 With the ‘collapse of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, however, the urban feminist organisations [lost] the referential framework of their activities’, while the looming threat of war ‘denoted the end of their hopes’. By contrast, the Antifašistički front žena (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front, herea er AFŽ)15 stepped out onto the historical stage in 1942 as the

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‘legitimate (and sole) heir to (the feminist) tradition’.16 The AFŽ publication, Žena u borbi (Woman in ba le), started to come out in June 1943.17 The Yugoslav Partisan press followed Vladimir I. Lenin’s thinking on propaganda and agitation which identified the press and radio primarily as a ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’ for achieving Party’s objectives.18 Apart from publications of the Central Command of the National Liberation Army and of the Partisan detachments in Croatia, many military units (the corps, divisions, brigades, ba alions and platoons) also issued periodicals.19 Towards the end of the war, the Partisan press, with its hundreds of thousands of printed copies of papers, brochures and leaflets, was not only reaching ‘every combatant wherever he may have been’,20 but, according to the words of a well-known Partisan journalist, had ‘flooded … all the liberated and occupied territory … having a strong [influence] on … informing the people’.21 Meanwhile, the ruling Ustasha regime constantly warned that the press was the very force ‘propelling barefoot and hungry hundreds and thousands through the forests’, a weapon more dangerous than any other if placed ‘in the service of evil, perversion and obscurantism’.22

The Female Partisan as People’s Heroine Svetozar Ri ig, parish priest of the Church of St Mark in Zagreb and an active participant in the Narodnooslobodilački pokret (National Liberation Movement, herea er NOP), described from direct observation the ‘combative woman of the common folk’ in the newspaper Žena u borbi. In his words, she showed ‘unprecedented female heroism that has its roots somewhere deep in the Balkan oral tradition, when the entire people fought for the honourable Cross and golden liberty’.23 For him, the women who had joined the Partisans underwent ‘a strange ethical transformation of their femininity’, so that they now ‘comfort[ed] and heal[ed] souls with the patriotic and gentle words of their female being’, guided by a feeling of ‘female idealism, chivalry, and sisterhood, [which] springs from the depths of the noble female soul, so that the sacred words of the Lord’s Prayer about the brotherhood of all people are near to her’.24 This example, which at first glance might seem surprising coming from an author committed to the Catholic Church, is otherwise in no way exceptional. In fact, it corresponds with the extensive body of thought of that time which interpreted the role of women in the Partisan Movement as a manifestation of the folk tradition – the last element in a continuum – but which also adopted the patriotic fervour of the pre-war populist women’s involvement. Similarly, the Partisan print media would quote fragments of political speeches by the Radić brothers, Antun (1868–1919) and Stjepan (1871–1928), who had been Croatian political icons during the pre-war period. An article addressed to the ‘Female comrades in occupied Croatia’ reminisced: When the Radić brothers taught the people about the new politics, they called on women to help them, explaining that they would never achieve their rights unless the entire populous participated in that undertaking, that is, including the women… Stjepan Radić [taught you] that it was your duty to take care not


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only of your home, but also of your homeland. He taught you that you are equal to men in your homeland duty, as well as in the domestic sphere.25 The drawing by Đuro Tiljak (1895– 1965) reproduced here (Figure 1) bore the same message about the continuity in perceiving women’s role: it shows an old woman carrying a bundle of rifles on her back just as she would carry a bundle of kindling. Herself heroic, she is also depicted as the ‘mother of heroes’: ‘Her four sons are in the struggle – four precious stones’.26 Figure 1. Woman carrying rifles, drawing by Many portraits of women Parti- Đuro Tiljak (1895–1965). sans published in the Partisan press Source: Žena u borbi (Woman in ba le), vol. 2, no. 12–13 testified to the ‘bright personage of the (1945): 6. Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica (National woman-combatant’. They were young, and University Library), Zagreb. as described by one of the participants in the Partisan Movement, Katica Miščević-Beba, of ‘robust appearance’, ‘sound faces’ and ‘full of defiant youth’ and they ‘marched in the long column of fighters’: Not in uniforms, we did not have them yet. Instead of military caps they covered their unruly locks with white, red or yellow scarves of all kinds. The wide skirts, carefully woven during long winter nights, shimmered. They looked like spring flowers among the comrades, standing out like flowers against the dark surface of the ground. But still they were not white flowers, gentle flowers that immediately wither when you pick them. They were our first womenfighters. Their carbine could cruelly cut down [the enemy].27 They, rather than their male brothers-in-arms, were the first to go into ba le: Katica’s platoon ‘lost … their commanding officer. That’s a terrible loss … but the ba le has to be continued. And Katica led the platoon… With five comrades, she stormed into the town and charged the bunker’.28 In addition to female combatants, the Partisan press wrote about women who had devoted themselves to agitation and the organisation of the NOP. One of them was Dina Zlatić (1914–2003) who would become the Minister of Communal Affairs in the government of the Narodna Republika Hrvatska (People’s Republic of Croatia, 1945–1963 [part of post-war Yugoslavia], herea er NRH). ‘A er an exhausting day’s work followed by a march’, Zlatić crouched ‘over the weak light of a peasant oil-lamp’, writing ‘tirelessly, deep into the night’.29 The figure of the brave ‘new woman’ in Partisan recruiting propaganda was an amalgam, however, of the republican Marianne, Christian Madonna, Soviet proletarian woman comrade and the disguised virgin fighter from the ba les against O oman Turks (Figure 2).

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Figure 2. The Partisan fighting mother. Source: The cover of Žena u borbi (Woman in ba le), vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1943). Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica (National and University Library), Zagreb.

Most women in the Partisan Movement played their part without arms, and largely carried out the duties of couriers, telegraph operators, secretaries to the armed military units, cultural activists, teachers, cooks and nurses who brought cheerfulness into the wards with ‘their vivacity and singing’ and took care of the wounded. Many were responsible for feeding and clothing the soldiers, and organised community life in the liberated territory.30 In le ers regularly published by the Partisan press, women encouraged the fighters, sought revenge for fallen comrades, and promised: ‘For our part, we will try to work as hard as possible, to help you and to await you, having acqui ed ourselves without any stains on our honour’.31 These efforts of female Partisans should be understood as a response to the activities of the Propaganda Office and the Anti-Communist Activities Office of the NDH both of which demonised the women Partisans as godless, morally corrupt and inclined to debauchery. This debauchery occurred, supposedly, in the Partisan units far from the ba lefields and in beds that the Partisans le to go off to ba le.32 As the war advanced, the Ustasha official organs published frequent messages about ‘two worlds


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– two women’, one being the ‘world of the woman-mother’, the other the ‘world of the woman-beast’, who, obsessed with the ‘theories of free love and emancipation’, was deemed to have become ‘a public cha el’.33 Such a woman remained ‘disgraced, dishonoured, humiliated and trampled upon’, a woman who ‘kills her own children while they are in her womb’ in order to be able to celebrate a ‘wanton feast’ with her ‘comrade-commissars’.34 The Ustasha press particularly singled out women who carried guns claiming that Partisan women were deprived of ‘human feelings’ and that some ‘personally kill their victims or even themselves knock aside the stools under the gallows of those sentenced to death’.35 In the context of these demonising images of Partisan women, the above-mentioned comment by Monsignor Svetozar Ri ig about the brave new Amazons among the Partisan warriors/combatants fighting for ‘the honourable Cross and the golden liberty’ was aimed primarily at those anti-fascists who did not embrace the idea of social revolution and gender egalitarianism. A er all, the Partisan press did not conceal the fact that this project faced many obstacles: Partisan reports from the field testified to the ‘reactionary disparagement of women and their capabilities’ in Partisan units and in ‘the organs of national authority’.36

The Ustasha Woman in the War: ‘The Advanced School of Mercy’ The Ženska loza (Distaff-side) of the Croatian Ustasha Movement was founded by a decree of Ante Pavelić (1889–1959), the poglavnik (leader) of the NDH, on 17 November 1941, for women to become ‘the mother[s]… of the great national family’ and to fulfil the task of the ‘revival of the nation and the renewal of society’.37 The Ustasha women’s press was intended for the ‘ideological education’ of the members of the movement as well as other ‘non-organised Croatian women’. The Ustasha press took as its model the Croatian woman, placing her without exception beside the ideal man, as his complimentary other (half): as ‘martyrdom’ alongside ‘heroism’, ‘tears’ alongside ‘reasoning’, ‘hope’ alongside ‘conscience’, ‘the Gospels’ alongside ‘the Code of Laws’, ‘an angel’ alongside ‘a genius’ and ‘heart’ alongside ‘intellect’:38 Therefore, the woman and the man play an equally important part in the life of the nation, only with different tasks… Since by Divine stipulation and by natural laws a woman stands alongside her man as his companion, helpmate, guide and counsel, we may not ever in any way and at any time separate her from him … in peace as in war, the wife is inseparable from the husband, then, too, she is one with him, sometimes forced even alone to carry out her task in replacing and augmenting the role of the man, if he has been obliged temporarily or permanently to move on further, to another profession, to another assignment.39 For both women and men, the Ustasha press stressed, war was an ‘advanced school of mercy’. The man would prove by his ‘mind and will’ that he was a ‘match’ for what was coming and had the ‘maturity’ for it, while the woman would do so with her

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‘heart’. In cases ‘where it [was] a ma er of helping one’s neighbour’, the woman had to be even be er than the man since ‘already by her nature and calling and social position she [was] more called upon’ to fulfil this role. These same ideas are echoed by Olga Osterman (1885–1955), an author for Ustaškinja (The Ustasha woman) magazine: Our spiritually reborn, renewed, mature Croatian woman must become a quiet fighter, who will help the Croatian people become: 1. numerically stronger; 2. as healthy as possible in body and mind; 3. morally developed to the highest degree possible; 4. as strong as possible culturally; 5. as nationally aware as possible; and, 6. as powerful and militant as possible, and in every positive sense as effective as possible… This is the great, honourable and chivalrous task of the new Croatian woman, which Croatian reality assigns to her… The Croatian State will be built up by all the [members of the] Croatian nation, the Croatian soldier will defend the borders of his country, while the Croatian home will be built and defended, in an equally wise and chivalrously courageous way, by the new Croatian woman.40 Unlike the Partisan heroine, the Ustasha woman could not dare to go to ba le: her security was a kind of guarantee for the future of Croatia. For her mission to be understandable and acceptable to her fellow countrymen, this new Ustasha exemplary Croatian woman had to rely on tradition; she had been ‘created and built, raised up and lead’ through the ‘torturous and tempestuous’ past of the Croatian people. She was also the one who ‘quietly stood behind all of our great men’. If she had not been there, history itself would have taken a bad turn, because she was the one who ‘inspired hope, strength and courage in those who were about to falter, and to despair. She encouraged them to hold out or to die heroically, anything rather than that they betray, or break faith’. And finally, ‘when it was necessary, in [times of] extreme peril, she, too, had taken up a weapon to defend and preserve her holy of holies and those of the nation’. But, ‘that had been necessary only in particular, exceptional cases and events. Otherwise she had always remained faithful to her primary task as a woman and mother’.41 As such, she had welcomed with an ‘open heart’ and ‘open arms’ the freedom which the NDH had bestowed upon her: She knew that her real time was coming only now, with the removal of so many entrenched and forcibly implanted barbs… and pu ing in the correct place concepts of virtues in the place of corruption. And when the Leader called upon her to unite her forces… so that all Croatian women, all of them, would stand together driven by one aspiration, to work for the State, to re-invigorate life and to help in cases of suffering, then every true Croatian woman knew that her place was where he, the Leader, wanted it…Yes, she realised that she would show herself to be most obedient and most enthusiastic… if she would be exact, faithful and conscientious in her most minor tasks… the mother of numerous children… Yes, she knows that the future of the nation and the happiness of the homeland lie in her hands and depend on her children; what


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Croatia will be in twenty, thirty and one hundred years from now, and if there will be a Croatia at all.42

The Short Life of a Partisan Screen Heroine In the two decades following 1945, the socialist commemoration culture militarised and masculinised the revolutionary past. It extolled the physical heroism and sacrifice made in the name of the collective, emphasising the feeling of obligation towards the dead and celebrating the personality cult of loyalty to the military leadership headed by the Marshal-President. The recent past, although retold in the ideological vocabulary of the proletarian revolution and of anti-fascism, moved seamlessly from the epic heroic tales of earlier wars and famous ba les. In fact, one problem was how to seek out the rhetoric and symbolism with which to show women’s contribution to the Partisan struggle. The Narodna fronta Hrvatske (National Front of Croatia, herea er NFH) called on women to come out and vote in the elections held in the summer of 1946: The efforts of women in the reconstruction of the country are heroic. They are just as great as was the struggle in war time against the blood-stained enemy… The elections today mean the general struggle for strengthening and developing the National Government. For women, it is a call to join in the ba le for the implementation and development of all their rights, for destroying reactionary [forces], the mortal enemies of women’s rights, and for the destruction of everything that has humiliated women.43 Similar appeals could be heard at that time from Bulgaria to Mexico, inviting women to take up their newly acquired right to vote. Strictly adhering to ideological, class and gender correctness, communist-era historiography endeavoured to construct narratives of the original and complete integration of women into the workers’, communist and Partisan movements.44 Later feminist historical research, similar to that carried out in the 1980s by the American historian Barbara Jancar-Webster, refuted what was, in fact, the mythologising of history.45 Information on the very modest presence of women in the executive military structures and later in the political bodies of power indicates that the post-war sharing of power did not proportionally reward female dedication46 in a society in which ‘women’s representation in the organs of power fell between 1948 and 1952’ from 19.01 to 13.07 percent.47 Such a destiny for the newly born ideals of equality was depicted – most probably without clear premeditation – in the fate of Slavica, the Partisan heroine in the first post-war Yugoslavian feature film with the same name (1947), who was predestined to die on the screen. Film critic Nenad Polimac has explained the large number of female leading roles in the post-war period (in Slavica [Slavica], Priča o tvornici [The factory story], Živjet će ovaj narod [This nation will live], Besmrtna mladost [Immortal youth] and Zastava [The flag]) as being due to the influence of Soviet socialist-realism and its mythical presentation of women on film. ‘It was soon clear just how deceptive that predominance and dignity of the female personages at that time was. As soon as

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the direct influence of Soviet socialist-realism came to an end… everything continued in the customary manner. The man became the standard-bearer and prime mover of events while the woman was his contrast or even the prize that he won through his persistence’.48 In an essay dedicated to Croatian women Partisans as a local example of one of the most striking female icons of the twentieth century, anthropologist Svetlana Slapšak claimed that Slavica’s death was no coincidence. According to Slapšak, Slavica died on the screen ‘for higher objectives and for the future’ when it had become quite clear that the female Partisan, ‘unlike her male counterpart in the movement’, would not be able to retain her privileged, victorious position: ‘new social and fashion trends and the new mentality had finally pushed [her] out onto the margin, in jests and in the difficult but now completed past’.49 Like Slavica, women who participated in the Second World War, in either military or civilian capacities, became silenced soon a erwards.

‘Is it Possible That There Are No Leading Roles for a Woman, Neither in Life nor in Art?’ The major change in public representations of the Second World War occurred in the 1960s, when the myth of the Yugoslav war experience started to crumble, becoming more profane, sentimental and romantic, adopting modes of communication and genres then popular in Yugoslav culture. Indeed, this change fits Anthony Giddens’s interpretation of reflexive modernisation as having been characterised from the 1960s onwards by ‘experimental’ openness and ‘dialogic democracy’;50 it also fits Pierre Nora’s assumption about the process of the atomisation and privatisation of collective memories during the 1960s and 1970s.51 The boom of Yugoslav war films and television series, together with site-specific war museums and new commemorative sites, was, however, a consequence of two different socio-political drives. One came from below, with obvious enthusiasm for localised heroic stories, while the other reflected the first serious Yugoslav state crisis and the political elite’s need for a refreshed foundational and legitimising story. Among the corresponding media content, the television series ‘Kapelski kresovi’ (The bonfires on the Kapela mountain, 1975–1976) was particularly popular. ‘Kapelski kresovi’ was based on the eponymous novel (1961) by Veljko Kovačević (1912–1994), a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and later commander of the First Primorje-Goranski corps of the Partisan forces. The enthusiastic reception of this series was enhanced by the inclusion into the story-line of customary ‘Hollywood paraphernalia’, including excessively heroic ba les, last-minute escapes, shootings from galloping horses, love interest and comic relief. And the ‘proto-personage’ of Partisan women was also transformed, according to the Hollywood starlet model, into women who, in addition to goodness, selflessness, gentleness and principles were endowed also with ‘harmonious curves, full of allure’.52 The series offered three such female personages, all in romantic relationships with three leading male actors: two nurses, Lea and Pavka, and a member of the Communist Youth organisation called Ina.53 Unlike these young nurses, Ina was open, ‘unfe ered in her a itude’ (behaving ‘like a man’), and did not hide


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behind ‘girlish embarrassment’. She suffered no ‘female infirmity’ and could stand side by side with her male comrades, sharing all the responsibilities of participating in the revolution, demonstrating the ideals first advocated in 1919 by the Bolsheviks’ principal theoretician on gender, Aleksandra Kollontai (1872–1952). In short, she was able to ‘value her freedom and independence, instead of being submissive and lacking in personality; the affirmation of her individuality, instead of a naïve a empt to absorb and reflect someone else’s cast of mind’.54 She had initially worked ‘in the rear’, in the ‘occupied territory … so that [she could play] her unknown, and o en unrecognised, but valuable role’. Ina managed to achieve a lot because of her ‘dynamic figure, which swayed when she wore high heels, emphasising her exceptionally well-sculptured legs’. She was equally lovely even a er she joined the Partisan unit: ‘Her hair curled on both sides [of her face] and fell in the form of two braids onto her chest. She wore her three-point cap tilted to the le , so that it looked like a small female hat’.55 The apparent ambivalence in Ina’s mental and physical a ributes is more than mere reflection of a masculine yearning for a socialist woman who would retain and reveal her feminine body: it also echoes a debate about gender roles current at the beginning of the communist revolutionary project a er the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917.56 The first of the thirteen episodes of the television series was broadcast on the most important state holiday, the Day of the Republic, 29 November 1975. An instant success, the press reported that ‘a surprisingly high percentage of 83.1’ of viewers in the age group up to fi een years of age regularly watched every episode, and that kindergarten children were playing a game based on ‘Kapelski kresovi’.57 The press also noted that, unlike children, older viewers were more critical. Their criticisms were based largely on comparisons with their own war time experiences, and related to the ‘unrealistic presentation of events’ and ‘the naivety of the situations’.58 In addition, perhaps for the first time since the war, other individual female voices surfaced, asking, ‘Is it possible that there are no leading roles for a woman, neither in life nor in art?’, and commenting that ‘the contribution of women to the Revolution, which is still an unfinished process, still has not found an adequate place in our art’.59 At the beginning of 1976, the Zagreb Television Drama Programme produced a series entitled ‘Marĳa’, describing the life of a female worker in the Third Reich as slave labour. It spoke of the ‘heroism and superhuman undertaking of a woman’ in whom the viewers were meant to recognise ‘the strength, nobility and human beauty of many of our women and mothers who did not regard the Revolution and their participation in it as some sort of exceptional act, but as their human obligation, their debt to the struggle against the occupying [forces], and to the different life [that would follow]’.60 This television drama also testifies to the unique cultural position that Yugoslavia held between East and West.61 The TV-series ‘Marĳa’ (1976) preceded the be erknown NBC nine-and-a-half hour TV mini-series ‘Holocaust’ (1978), considered to be the turning point in the European ‘history of victimhood’ that became ‘organised memorisation’ in American popular culture.62 In a similar way, ‘Marĳa’ denoted a shi in the dominant popular representation of war time trauma, with its sentimental and ‘feminine’ treatment of suffering in the not exclusively Jewish concentration-camp under the Third Reich. Film critic Đuro Plemenčić summarised the aesthetic and ethi-

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cal critiques with regard to triviality and kitsch, ‘theatrical and pathetic characters’ and ‘concocted experiences’ in the place where ‘Europe’s most searing genocide’ had taken place.63 Although both the American and Croatian productions were criticised for presenting human tragedy in the style of a soap-opera, ‘Marĳa’ in particular under-represented the enormity of the Holocaust or the Nazi concentration camps64 (Figure 3). During the same years, autobiographies appeared on the book market, describing the life of women Partisans in a new way, less focused on revolutionary ‘factography’ and more on introspective Figure 3. Two former internees – too good depictions of individual destines that looking for camp survivors. A still from the were not heroic but simply were inserted TV-series ‘Marĳa’ (1976), director: Stipe Delić. among other similar lives. These destiSource: Rat, revolucĳa, ekran (War, revolution, screen), nies were o en tragic and full of contraeds. Stevo Ostojić et al., Zagreb: Spektar, 1977, 152. dictions, unsuccessful in their efforts to reconcile the sexual and social, the traditional and revolutionary, that is, the emancipatory female role. An example is Tebi, moja Dolores (To you, my Dolores, 1978), in which the well-known Partisan physician, Saša Božović (1912–1996), speaks about her first-born child who died during the war. This book went through ten editions and was staged as a popular monodrama and aired as TV drama in 1980.

The Third Womanhood in the Era of Socialist Gender Egalitarianism The first feminist initiatives emerged at the end of the 1970s through the incentive of women in intellectual Marxist circles. A er the UN-sponsored International Women’s Year (1975), the leading Marxist female intellectuals of Slovenia and Croatia organised a conference at Portorož (Slovenia) in 1976 where, ‘for the first time, although closed to the public, feminism was discussed’. The first contemporary international feminist conference held in Yugoslavia took place in Belgrade in the autumn of 1978, organised by art historian Dunja Blažević and sociologist Žarana Papić (1949–2002). The participants discussed the contemporary women’s movement, psychoanalysis, sexuality, female identity, women and/in culture and women, capitalism and revolution.65 As Andrea Feldman has testified, reactions to this conference were stormy, and several of the regime’s newspapers in Belgrade wrote about it in a sensationalist way.66 Although more sophisticated than the war time ideological a acks on the independent, disobedient, maladjusted ‘third’ womanhood, for whom self-realisation allegedly


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was more important than any collective project, articles by individual ‘on-duty’ social chroniclers revealed the reverse side of the coin of declarative gender egalitarianism. As demonstrated in a public debate at that time between feminist journalist Slavenka Drakulić and journalist Igor Mandić, male socialist intellectuals did not shrink from attacking the moral and sexual identity of their female colleagues who identified themselves as feminist.67 Mandić pronounced them to be ‘frustrated, sex-starved, hysterical, but also asexual and butch’.68 This typical misogynist agenda directed against women feminists reveals that socialist male intellectuals were afraid of really emancipated, empowered and politically active women who, like Drakulić, became role models for open-minded and critical Yugoslav intellectuals. The main argument in a acks against liberal feminists during the 1980s, as quoted in essays by Drakulić, was their supposed elitism, love of power and lack of class awareness.69

The ‘Willing Executioners’ or ‘Beautiful Souls’ in the 1990s Since the early 1980s, a new branch of historiographic, journalistic and memoir works which are full of national resentment and images of inter-ethnic violence has replaced the 1970s trend of more intimately wri en and filmed ‘feminised’ history.70 The male voice dominated as ‘the voice of conscience’ and historical accountability for the national fate of the Croatian collective, evoking memories of forbidden places in the Croatian history of war time genocide and post-war communist reprisals. The prevailing discourse of the 1980s was a re-traumatisation of ethnically- and ideologicallyaware witnesses – victims of the communist single-party system – that eliminated all the taboos that had been imposed for decades by official policy ‘aimed at inter-ethnic reconciliation and co-existence’. For that reason, the new historical juncture – the introduction of the ‘new democracy’, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and war – could count on interpretations which identified the ethno-nationalistic violence in Yugoslavia during the last decade of the twentieth century as the result of collective ‘frustration’ produced by communist ideology.71 The ‘exemplary’ woman of the 1990s, now ‘liberated’ from the socialist myths of being the travel-mate of the ‘new man’, reverted to pre-revolutionary ideals. A major and extremely expensive media project of Croatian Television in 1999, the film and televised series ‘Četverored, priča o Bleiburgu’ (Files of four, the story of Bleiburg) had as its theme the bloody reprisals of the Partisan victors over their captive fellowcountrymen at the end of the Second World War when German and Croatian troops were withdrawing through Slovenia towards Bleiburg in Austria, and the Allied indifference toward this violence. Although this episode, together with the ‘death marches’ that followed, is still controversial in Croatian historiography, the authors of ‘Četverored’ had no doubt: their version was black and white, with the defeated side gaining an aura of justice and martyrdom. Two women characters are set in the foreground: Mirta Mesog, a young and beautiful Jewish stage actress, whose brother is a member of the Ustasha youth organisation, and Bosiljka Đurić, a Partisan woman. Together with her brother, Baja Mesog, and her boyfriend, Ivan Telebar, Mirta joins those who decide to

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leave Zagreb a er the news spreads that the Partisan troops are entering the city. The series shows her silently walking in the long column of the defeated. Later in the film, the destiny of this ‘beautiful soul’ is inscribed in one of the closing scenes: invoking the image of the Virgin Mary, wearing a nun’s habit and illuminated by a ray of sunshine, she bends over the wounded soldier, Ivan, whose rescue from Partisan reprisals has been occasioned by a vow of silence about Partisan crimes.72 The character of Bosiljka Đurić, modelled a er an historical figure of the same name who was a guard in the transit camp for Slavonian ethnic Germans, is depicted in a particularly negative way. Ivan Aralica, a leading member of the then-ruling Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (Croatian Democratic Union, herea er HDZ) and author of the script for ‘Četverored’, through his hyperbolic sketching of Đurić’s grotesquely caricatured physical ugliness, implies the ‘moral monstrosity’ of other Partisan women as well: Those truculent girls and women, those pimply, unwashed and uncombed sla erns… with hand grenades hanging from their waists and German Schmeisers [sub-machine guns] on their chests, that very gu er of human life, of unsightliness and monstrosity, surpassed anything ugly, evil and vile that I had ever seen in my life until then… 73 This quotation shows how the ideological changes of the 1990s changed the meaning of the entire anti-Fascist Partisan movement in the post-socialist Croatian cultural scene. Not only did such media projects turn Partisan women into ugly, hysterical and merciless avengers, but they also managed to discredit the socialist revolution and present its emancipatory project as an ‘historical mistake’. The spectre of the armed woman has also been reconfigured as a trans-historical merciless woman warrior, perfectly embodied in the evil of fascist and communist regimes alike74 (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Partisan women executioners resting. A still from the film ‘Četverored, priča o Bleiburgu’ (Files of four, the story of Bleiburg, 1999), director Jakov Sedlar. Source: ‘Četverored, priča o Bleiburgu’ (Files of four, the story of Bleiburg), Zagreb: Croatia Film, 1999. VHS.


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Transmitting War History through the Postmodern Soap-Opera ‘Ponos Ratkajevih’ (The pride of the Ratkaj family), a semi-historical soap-opera written by three women authors, was first aired on 8 October 2007 and then broadcast daily until the spring of 2008. ‘Ponos Ratkajevih’ developed the fictional story of the aristocratic Ratkaj/Rathkay/Ra kay family that in fact no longer had historical descendants in 1938, the year when the story begins. The trials and tribulations of the head of the family (Karlo Ratkaj, and his dominant mother, Countess Antonĳa Ratkaj, his largely absent wife, Veronika Ratkaj, and his adult, self-centred children, Krsto and Izabela Ratkaj) a racted a regular audience until the moment when the historical context of the NDH became enmeshed into the tale. At that point the generation gap in the Ratkaj family was replaced by a much more pernicious one – the gulf between diverse political orientations. Due to the depiction of many historical events from war time Zagreb, such as the warm welcome of the Nazis who arrived on 10 April 1941, o en represented through the interpolation of archive film footage, viewer ratings of the series started to rise rapidly.75 Sharp criticism on the part of right-wing intellectuals followed as they saw the series as an amateurish, yet far from harmless, interpretation of one of the key junctures in Croatian history, which was identified by those critics as ‘lies and distortions’ even ‘cruder and more primitive’ than those ‘in Partisan films’.76 The series began with a clear ideological division separating characters into a balanced black and white scheme, while also including the potential of still uncommi ed ‘greyness’. This developed into an equally clear advocacy of the thesis that ‘the NDH was the dead-end of the Croatian nation’, ‘while the Partisan Movement was a praiseworthy anti-fascist alternative’.77 Needless to say, that shi was also reflected in the destinies of female characters. Among the positive characters in the series, there is a difference among the women who joined the movement as pre-war communists because of their ideological convictions (Helena Jurić, Tereza Macan): those who had no choice because their lives as Jewish women were threatened (Hana Wieser, Elisabeth ‘Lisa’ Cohen); those who were discriminated against socially and because of their gender (Ivka Križaj); and the character who compensated for her disappointments in life through the twofold role of British spy and cabaret singer who entertained the Germans and manipulated men (Allegra ‘Kiki’ Savičević, Dagmar Cohen). In keeping with genre conventions, however, the actions of all women are governed by love interests, emotional impulses and personal projections of the possibilities for female self-realisation in the stormy times of war. Despite genre expectations and ‘historical truth’, all female characters are spokespersons for feminist a itudes and criticism addressed to their male comrades.78 The ‘realistic’ scenes of violence towards women – taking place in the home, the hospital, in Ustasha camps or during an illegal abortion – are out of keeping with what one would expect from a soap opera. But, unlike socialist TV-series, the main characters in ‘Ponos Ratkajevih’ are women who cross with ease from the private into the public spheres to influence events although it is evident that, as in real life, there is no place for them in power structures. We do not know the motives that guided the three women writers, all born during the communist period, nor why the project was scheduled during prime time on

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State television. At a time when the series is nearing its hundred-eightieth episode, its popularity, however, is more difficult to explain.79 It is possible that the emancipated a itude and the leadership of the female characters are related to the gender and age of the scriptwriters and to their identification with female self-awareness and selfrespect and possibly to their having grown up with the wave of feminist ideas current during the late socialist period. Thus ‘Ponos Ratkajevih’ can be seen as reflecting a continuity of a itudes across the period of the 1991 breakdown, and as opposing efforts in Croatia over ten years to make society more patriarchal.

Istrian Partisan Women: ‘They Fought, Marched and Carried’ The fact that the moral imaginary of the Ratkaj family saga could rely on lived-through experience was also proven by our search for women’s memories of the war in Istria. This search coincided with the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the First Regional Conference of the AFŽ, the largest anti-fascist commemorative gathering in post-socialist Croatia, which was held on 7 August 2004 in Rašpor near the city of Buzet. On that occasion, we conducted some ten interviews in several Istrian towns (Buzet, Labin, Pula, Pazin). Some were individual and some, on the initiative of the women themselves, were group interviews. In these group interviews we tried to extricate our interviewees from their ‘fixation’ on memories connected with the secret preparation of the above-mentioned historical gathering, the commemoration of which took months of organisation by the anti-fascist veterans’ associations that were managed and dominated by their male comrades-in-arms.80 We asked the women about their pre-war, war time and post-war roles in their families, the a itudes of their mothers to their war time engagement, female assignments in the rear (all of them were activists in the AFŽ) and on the front (none of them had been formally included in the fighting troops), anti-female propaganda in Fascist publications, survival in the Fascist and Nazi camps, their post-war participation in public life and their role in commemorating events from the socialist Revolution. Our conversations soon revealed a clear outline of the female position, best described in the words of the poet Drago Gervais (1904–1957) inscribed on a stone monument to the women in Rašpor: ‘They fought, marched and carried’. Put differently, the women, who were largely from rural and working-class families, carried out various assignments as unarmed assistants to the resistance movement, risking their lives by doing courier, mobilisation and hospital work, and depriving themselves of food to give it to the Partisans. One interviewee, Jele Nežić (b. 1925), who was a participant in the Rašpor conference, claimed that the idea behind the gathering had been to strengthen the female rear-guard front, but she also told us that the women at that time were be er organised than the men: ‘It was important to organise women to send their sons and husbands [to join the Partisans]… Those were women who were organised, organised long before…’81 We were prepared to understand the stereotypical, ideologised narratives of our interviewees, now around eighty years of age and living in modest circumstances, in keeping with the results of numerous oral history research projects in other coun-


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tries, according to which participants in war time events are inclined to interchange personal memories, to reconcile them with (subsequent) representations in popular culture82 Our interviewees’ statements have been shaped according to pa erns that we had observed in the Partisan press, almost uncontaminated by socialist heroic or melodramatic portraits of women in arms. Their stories confirmed the idea of diverse strata of memory as described by Doris Lessing in an essay dedicated to her father: that his memories ‘changed and were built in the way that living memory is built’, whereas his memories of participation in the First World War ‘were frozen in a story that he constantly re-told, in the same words and with the same gestures, stereotyped phrases’.83 One definitely should bear in mind that the preparations for the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary, in which our interviewees took an active part, re-awakened a rhetoric that had been suppressed by an ordinary, ‘unheroic’ everyday life.84 On the other hand, it seems likely that a specific veteran sub-culture had persisted and was maintained by the local female network remaining in its initial definition of Croatian and Partisan Istria: You will never experience … that enthusiasm … nor will we ever [again], even if we live another hundred years. It was incredible how people joined the [Partisan] movement. Because Fascism was very tough… I said: I have my ideal, and that ideal of mine is still current. But when will it be achieved; it has ground to a halt right now. Today, I said, they have put the brakes on us a bit. We can’t… But I [still] say: If there’s to be honesty and humanity… sooner or later it [le ist ideals] will win… But things are ugly now, really ugly.85 This veteran’s words explain one of the most important reasons for keeping anti-fascist moral narratives alive in an almost frozen form. Socialist indifference for individual veterans’ stories, together with the overall relativisation of the anti-fascist struggle in the years a er 1990, have featured as a main force in creating a rather homogeneous community of those anti-fascists who still remember the days of sorrow, sacrifice and glory. The Istrian women we interviewed showed their excitement because of our interest in their personal stories and reflections, an interest they had never experienced in their hardworking and anonymous lives. Eighty-three year old Marĳa Licul (b. 1922), one of our best interviewees and a gi ed narrator, told us about a recent visit by her chimney-sweep who, noticing a pile of old publications in her lo , asked her to give him some, but not any ‘Partisan stuff ’. She was repulsed by this and recounted that episode to him to demonstrate that her identity as a former Partisan was profoundly linked to her desire to identify with the Allies and their leaders, such as the Italian politician Sandro Pertini (1896–1990). Pertini was a fellow prisoner with her father, whom she had a chance to visit in 1942. Her encounter with the chimney-sweep led to her reprimand: Do you know who Pertini was, do you? You don’t know? Alright then, if you don’t know, it is be er that you don’t. It’s because you don’t know, that you can say things like that. If you knew about it, then you wouldn’t be saying that.86

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Conclusion Although the political rhetoric of Yugoslav socialism privileged the male-dominated revolutionary grand narrative that had ‘proven itself’ during the war, mass media and interpersonal communication enabled the survival of alternate stories typical of female memories of war experiences and accounts of women’s agency in particular. Feminist intellectuals consistently entered visible positions in academic, literary and public life from the 1970s onwards in line with the emancipatory discourses of the foremothers of the AFŽ. Meanwhile, conservative a itudes about separate spheres and goals for Croatian women promoted by the right-wing community survived in less visible locations on the social map of Croatia largely in the long-ghe oised narrations of members of the Croatian political and economic diaspora.87 In the 1980s, feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky (1952–1990) did pioneering work on the role of the AFŽ in post-war social and cultural changes. Her work opened the epistemic framework for further research in the field and, at the same time, unveiled the clash between the new socialist role model for women and the AFŽ heritage.88 The resurrection of memories of female Partisans as dehumanised, ‘deviant’ or bestial women, such as were offered in the Croatian media during the 1990s, breathed new life into the stereotypes of the Ustasha press from the time of Second World War. While, according to Slavoj Žižek, the innocent and shocked view of the horror of the Balkans is itself part of the problem of the liberal multi-cultural West,89 a er the last war in Croatia (1991–1995), the domestic democratic and le ist public was similarly unable to confront the trauma of post-Second World War communist persecutions of both female and male le ist antagonists.90 During the 1991–1995 war, and despite many activities and loud protests by feminist peace activists and feminist groups, political and media discourse remained nonfeminist with women pushed into the intellectual and political margins by a militarised and masculinised society as if echoing the repertoire of Second World War-Rightist rhetoric.91 The populist politics of the then ruling HDZ leaned heavily on the support and enthusiasm of women as the generators of biological, cultural and symbolic reproduction of the national collective. Women’s role was to remain that of ‘beautiful souls’ who waited for their ‘just warriors’.92 Starting with the first traces of political democratisation in Croatian society a er the January 2000 elections, the mass media became an unexpected generator of memory and hope. What le -wing discourse in Croatia had failed to do, has been achieved successfully by an unpretentious TV-soap opera, which rendered inseparable the image of politically active and gender-aware women who decided on their own future and who found ways to oppose the power at the top. While the recasting of the revolutionary myth in socialist cultural memory coincided with a shi from the elite into the popular culture register, its additional post-modern transformation has come about through the expansion of a female audience and through the development of soap opera as the most popular genre of mainstream media. If ‘stories shape the way we understand experiences’, our understanding of the experiences of our foremothers ‘in turn create[s] the stories that, hopefully, are transforming historical literature’.93 This liberating discourse on women’s contribution to modern Croatian history indicates an important direction for Croatian society. For, if any thanks are due to socialist egalitar-


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ianism incorporated into the Yugoslav war mythology, then they are for the strengthening of gender self-awareness and self-respect among the female population as well as among female scholars dealing with the pictorial turn in historical research.

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Translated from Croatian by Nina Antoljak

About the Authors

Reana Senjković (PhD, Research Advisor, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb) is the author of the books: Lica društva, likovi države (Faces of society, images of the state, 2002) and Izgubljeno u prĳenosu (Lost in transmission, 2008), and co-editor of Fear, Death, and Resistance: An Ethnography of War, Croatia 1991/92 (1993) and Etnografije interneta (Internet ethnographies, 2004). All these books have been published by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb. Address: Institut za etnologĳu i folkloristiku, Zvonimirova 17, HR-10 000 Zagreb, Croatia. Email: [email protected].

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Renata Jambrešić Kirin (PhD, Senior Research Assistant, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb) is the author of the book Dom i svĳet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja (Home and the world: on women’s cultural memory, 2008) and co-editor of four collections: War, exile, everyday life: cultural perspectives, 1996; Između roda i naroda (Between gender and nation, 2005); Promišljanje sjevera i juga u postkolonĳalnosti (Rethinking North and South in Post-Coloniality, 2008); and Glasom do feminističkih promjena (Voicing feminist concerns, 2009). Address: Institut za etnologĳu i folkloristiku, Zvonimirova 17, HR-10 000 Zagreb, Croatia. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1. We dedicate this article to our dear Istrian interviewees, in particular Jele Nežić (b. 1925) from Selca near Buzet, and Marĳa Licul (b. 1922) from Labin. 2. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971, 1. 3. Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006, 10. 4. It should be emphasised that both the Ustasha movement and the KPJ had separate political bodies whose assignment was to organise propaganda activities. The Državni izvještajni i promidžbeni ured (State reporting and promotion bureau) of the NDH was founded in June 1941 and consisted of the Press Office, the Propaganda Office, the Control of Publishing Activities Office, the Film and Cinema Office, the Anti-Communist Activities Office, and the Ustasha Press Supervisory Service Department. In addition, ‘as early as under the illegal [clandestine] conditions between the two wars, the Party had trained cadres skilled in the management and operation of numerous small editorial boards and printing shops, so that many combatants applied their experience a er war broke out in propaganda activities during the war. Thus, as early as in 1942, Centralna tehnika Agitpropa (The central technics of Agitprop) developed on the liberated territory of Lika’. The Agitprop phase of Yugoslavian ‘cultural policy’ came to an end in 1952. See Mahmud Konjhodžić, ‘Informacĳa u NOB-u u Hrvatskoj’ (Information about the People’s Liberation War in Croatia), in Kultura i umjetnost u NOB-u i socĳalističkoj revolucĳi u Hrvatskoj (Culture and art during the People’s Liberation War and the socialist revolution in

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Croatia), eds. Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin et al., Zagreb: August Cesarec, 1975, 127–150, there 128. In contrast to the tendency to describe both movements as the outgrowth of totalitarian ideologies, we are guided by Slavoj Žižek’s succinct claim that the ‘Communist project was for the brotherhood and well-being of one and all, while the Nazi project was directly a project of domination … an anti-emancipational undertaking that succeeded only too well’. See Slavoj Žižek, O vjerovanju (On belief) Zagreb: Algoritam, 2005, 74. 5. All the examples we analysed were produced in the Socialist Republic of Croatia. It should be borne in mind, however, that the political leadership of Yugoslavia did not exercise full control over media institutions. See Patrick Hyder Pa erson, ‘Truth Half Told: Finding the Perfect Pitch for Advertising and Marketing in Socialist Yugoslavia 1950–1991’, Enterprise & Society 4 (2003): 179–225. In addition, the republics of Yugoslavia enacted their own, not fully reconciled, statutory provisions regarding ‘cultural policy’. The most radical example in a series of efforts ‘finally to put an end to the worthless and detrimental content’ that had filled the area of media-mediated popular culture since the end of the 1950s, by copying western models, or even literally transposing them by way of international press exchange, was the Act on the Taxation of Books, Newspapers and Other Publications passed in 1971. This Act imposed a tax on publications that specially-formed Republic commi ees characterised as ‘trash’. Considering the question of their popularity, see Leksikon Yu – mitologĳe (The lexicon of Yu mythology), eds. Vladimir Arsenĳević and Đorđe Matić, Zagreb: Postscriptum, 2005; Ivo Škrabalo, Između publike i države – Povĳest hrvatske kinematografije 1896–1980 (Between the audience and the state – a history of Croatian cinematography 1896–1980), Zagreb: Znanje, 1984. 6. The TV-film ‘Četverored’ was shown for the first time on 26 December 1999, sixteen days a er the death of Franjo Tuđman (1922–1999), president of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and of the Republic of Croatia, and immediately prior to the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held in January, 2000, when the HDZ, a centre-right party, lost power for the first time since Croatian independence. ‘Ponos Ratkajevih’ was broadcast in 2007/2008 during prime time. With its 180 episodes, it was ‘very o en the most highly watched show of all the domestic television programmes, with an average viewer rating of twenty percent and an unbelievable “share” of almost fi y percent’. See Nenad Polimac, ‘Endehazĳa u sapunici prikovala nas je uz tv’ (Endehazĳa [the NDH] in the soap-opera riveted us to our TVs), Jutarnji list (The morning paper), 5 April 2008, 76. 7. Joan Wallach Sco , Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in Feminism and History, ed. Joan W. Sco , New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 152–180; first published in American Historical Review vol. 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–1975. 8. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and decoding in the television discourse’, in CCCS Selected Working Papers. Volume 2, eds. Ann Gray et al, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 386–398, there 386. 9. Ustaškinja (The Ustasha woman) vol. 1, no. 8 (1942), 17; Žena u borbi (Woman in ba le) vol. 2, no. 12–13 (1945): 4–6. 10. The interviews were conducted with participants at the commemorative meeting of anti-fascists that was held to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the First Regional Conference of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front in Istria. That meeting, held on 22–23 June 1944 in the forest near Buzet on the Karst Plateau, allegedly was the largest gathering of anti-fascists in occupied Europe. The 2004 anniversary meeting turned into the largest commemorative gathering of anti-fascists in post-socialist Croatia, with some 3,000 people assembled there. See Božo Jakovljević, ed., Antifašizam na Buzeštini: Narodnooslobodilački pokret 1941–1945 (Anti-Fascism in the Buzet Region: The People’s Liberation Movement 1941–1945) Buzet: Izdavačko poduzeće Reprezent, 2003; Gordana Čalić Šverko, ‘One su se borile, hodile i nosile’ (They fought, marched and carried), Glas Istre (The voice of Istria), 8 August 2004, 7.


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11. For Raymond Williams a ‘structure of feeling[s]’ is ‘the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization’. And further: ‘I do not mean that the structure of feeling, any more than the social character, is possessed in the same way by the many individuals in the community. But I think it is a very deep and very wide possession, in all actual communities, precisely because it is on it that communication depends’. See Raymond Williams, ‘The Analysis of Culture’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader, ed. John Storey, New York, etc.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1998, 56–64, there 61. 12. Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi (Horses, women, wars), ed. Dunja Rihtman Auguštin, Zagreb: Druga, 1996, 79. 13. Ibid., 247. 14. See Lydia Sklevicky, ‘Organizirana djelatnost žena Hrvatske za vrĳeme narodnooslobodila-čke borbe 1941–1945’ (Organised activities of Croatian women during the People’s Liberation War 1941–1945), Povĳesni prilozi (Historical supplements) vol. 3, no. 1 (1984): 85–127; Andrea Feldman, ‘Uz dvadeset godina neofeminizma u Hrvatskoj’ (On the occasion of twenty years of neofeminism in Croatia), Kruh i ruže (Bread and roses) no. 10 (Winter 1999): 6–8. 15. The AFŽ was created in December 1942. Its main goal was ‘to enhance the recruitment of rural women into the Partisan Movement and develop a women’s support system in the rear that could sustain the Partisan effort’. See Barbara Jancar-Webster, ‘Women in the Yugoslav national liberation movement’, in Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999, 67–87, there 75. ‘The AFŽ was first and last a Communist Party tool to educate and mobilise women for its side of the conflict. The AFŽ was never meant to be an organisation of women representing women’ (Ibid., 82). The AFŽ was terminated in 1953 on the grounds ‘that the goal of gender equality could be be er promoted via party agencies which were not gender-specific’. See Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘In Tito’s Time’, in Idem, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans, 89–105, there 93; see also Dĳana Dĳanić et al., eds., Ženski biografski leksikon (Women’s biographical lexicon), Zagreb: Centar za ženske studĳe, 2004. 16. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 80–81. 17. In addition to Žena u borbi, the following journals also came out during the war: Rĳeč žene (The woman’s word); Lička žena u borbi (The woman of Lika in the liberation struggle); Drugarica (The woman comrade); Udarnica (The woman pioneer); Istranka (The woman of Istria); Primorka (The woman of Primorje); and Dalmatinka u borbi (The woman of Dalmatia in the liberation struggle). 18. V. I. Lenin, What is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, translated from the Russian, orig. published 1902, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973. 19. There were more than 2,800 papers to which one should add some 1,000 papers published by the ‘civil’ institutions of the NOP. See Mahmud Konjhodžić, ‘Informacĳa u NOB-u u Hrvatskoj’ (Information in the People’s Liberation War in Croatia), in Kultura i umjetnost u NOB-u i socĳalističkoj revolucĳi u Hrvatskoj (Culture and art in the People’s Liberation War and socialist revolution in Croatia), eds. Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin et al., Zagreb: August Cesarec, 1975, 127–150, 149. 20. IX dalmatinska udarna divizĳa (The ninth Dalmatian shock division) no. 2 (1945): 4. 21. Žena u borbi was printed in a relatively modest run of 1,200 to 5,000 copies. As Konjhodžić says, however, the Partisan press actually counted on a higher number of readers, since the articles were read aloud in organised ‘reading groups … for larger groups of people who were o en illiterate listeners’. Konjhodžić, ‘Informacĳa u NOB-u u Hrvatskoj’, 128–129. 22. Ibid. 23. Žena u borbi vol. 2, no. 12–13 (1945): 4–6. For a similar discussion on the role of antifascist women among le -wing and right-wing social groups in Italy and Greece, see Jomarie

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Alano, ‘Armed with a Yellow Mimosa: Women’s Defence and Assistance Groups in Italy, 1943– 45’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 38, no. 4 (2003): 615–631; and Margaret P. Anagnostopoulou, ‘From Heroines to Hyenas: Women Partisans During the Greek Civil War’, Contemporary European History vol. 10, no. 3 (2001): 481–501. 24. Ibid. 25. Žena u borbi vol. 1, no. 1 (1943): 5–6. 26. Ibid.,16. 27. Žena u borbi vol. 2, nos. 16–17 (1945): 10–12. 28. Ibid. The archetype of the armed girl who valiantly fights for the just cause – the salvation of her people and her family – was described in numerous Partisan songs. Still, the majority of the songs were about girls who joined the Partisans, filled with admiration for the beauty, courage and ‘ideological correctness’ of the new heroes of the national struggle, or about female Partisans as bi er avengers of murdered family members, rather than as brave women whose military engagement was the result of personal choice and political maturity. See Milan Bodiroga, Slobodo, sunce jarko (Oh freedom, my bright sunshine), Mostar: Univerzitet Džemal Bĳedić, 1981, 15, 37, 50, 85, 111, 55, 101, 106, 105, 110. 29. Žena u borbi vol. 6, no. 3 (1948): 3–4. 30. As described in 43. divizĳa (43rd Division) vol. 2, no. 3 (1945): 2: ‘Until yesterday, these were illiterate or semi-illiterate women, inert, shy, and lacking self-reliance, while today they are doing miracles. They always know what, when and how they should act. They manage to get through the enemy lines, through the wires and [past] the bunkers, crawling over stones, bringing the fighters food, clothing, arms, munitions, medical supplies, paper, printing type, machinery, a whole printing press, and all of that on their backs and always in mortal danger from the rain of enemy bullets. They cut telephone lines, dig up roads, organise work platoons for the job, plough, sow, harvest and carry prepared food, all in front of enemy positions. They help the hospitals, carry the wounded, serve in the army, bring together women for ba le and for work, while along with all that work they manage to enlighten people, hold conferences, publish newspapers and produce amateur entertainment shows’. 31. 43. divizĳa vol. 2, no. 9 (1945): 7: ‘There is a lot of talk about you, our dear sons, husbands and brothers, we speak a lot about what you have had to bear during our great, superhuman struggle for freedom and a be er future for our people. And even if you are far away from our Istria, we always remember you and think of you… We are convinced that you will soon come to our Istria, and that the so long awaited freedom will come with you. We know you are defeating the enemy and that you … are driving him from our dear and sweet homeland. Be worthy of the thousands who have died for the cause of the liberation of this nation. Revenge your fallen comrades and strike mercilessly at these German bandits and the domestic traitors. Do not let them escape. For our part, we shall try to work hard, to help you and to await you, having acqui ed ourselves without any stains on our honour’. 32. See also Wingfield and Bucur eds., Gender and War, 13; Eliza Ablovatski, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919’, in Ibid., 82–86. 33. Naš list (Our newspaper), vol. 1, no. 6 (1944): 1–2. 34. Naša borba (Our liberation struggle) no. 4 (1945): 1. 35. Ibid., no. 9 (1945): 1. 36. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 34–37. 37. Hrvatski ženski list (The Croatian women’s newspaper) vol. 6, no. 4 (1944): 15–16. ‘The people are a great family, in which the members of the Ženska loza (Distaff-side) are the same as mothers in the family: the bearers of love, warmth, guardians of all things holy and of legend, educators, monitors, and housewives, they develop their work wherever it is most needed and best, in keeping with the natural gi and feeling of women, which she also has for her family.


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And just as a mother takes care within the home that everyone is satisfied and that all feel the joy and satisfaction of family life, so the Ženska loza of the Croatian Ustasha Movement desires and endeavours to act among the Croatian people as the mother of the great national family’. 38. Hrvatski ženski list vol. 6, no. 4 (1944): 15–16; Ustaškinja vol. 3, no. 2 (1944): 15. 39. Ustaškinja vol. 1, no. 6 (1942): 3. 40. Ustaškinja vol. 2, no. 1 (1943): 5. 41. Ibid., 6–11. 42. Ibid. 43. Žena u borbi vol. 4 (1946): 32, 35. 44. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 13–24. 45. Barbara Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945, Denver: Arden Press, 1990. 46. ‘Although women made up more than one third (100,000) of the total number of participants in the NOB… there was not even one of them in the High Command or in the highest executive positions. Only one woman – the physician Roza Papo – became a general, but in her case that was probably due primarily to her professional prerogatives’. Sklevicky, ‘Organizirana djelatnost žena’, 126. 47. Ramet, ‘In Tito’s Time’, 99; Sklevicky, ‘Organizirana djelatnost žena’, 121–126. The share of women in the CK KPJ (Central Commi ee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia), the most important political body, remained around the same from the sixth Congress of the KPJ in 1952 until the mid-1980s; in other words, ‘a er forty years of promising equality, the LCY [League of Communists of Yugoslavia] granted women less than fi een percent of the seats in the Central Commi ee. While Communist Yugoslavia might look good, when it comes to gender inequality … it was damned by its own principles, by its own moral agenda’. Ramet ‘In Tito’s Time’, 102. 48. Nenad Polimac, ‘Žena i slika žene u jugoslavenskom filmu’ (The woman and the image of woman in Yugoslav film), Žena (Woman) vol. 38, no. 6 (1980): 23–31, there 24. 49. Svetlana Slapšak, Ženske ikone XX veka (Female icons of the twentieth century), Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2001, 209. 50. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. 51. Pierre Nora, ‘Between History and Memory’, Representations no. 26 (1989): 7–24. 52. Veljko Kovačević, Kapelski kresovi (The bonfires on the Kapela mountain), Zagreb: Mladost, 1975, 187, 229–230, 363. 53. A member of the Savez komunističke omladine Jugoslavĳe (League of the Communist Youth of Yugoslavia, SKOJ). 54. Lynne A wood, Creating the New Soviet Woman, Studies in Russian and East European History and Society, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1999, 10–11. 55. Kovačević, Kapelski kresovi, 97, 167, 172, 309. 56. For a comprehensive insight, see A wood, Creating the New Soviet Woman. 57. The weekly Studio no. 621 (20 February 1976): 2–5. 58. Ibid. During the 1970s, essential differences came about in the cinema treatment of war time themes. On the one hand, television projects (TV series and films) – some of which experienced exceptional viewer ratings in the countries of the Eastern Bloc and China such as ‘Valter brani Sarajevo’ (Walter defends Sarajevo, 1972) and ‘Otpisani’ (The wri en off, 1974) – were criticised because of their populism, genre profile (crime-detection and action war films), their borrowing from western ‘cultural and aesthetic comprehensions’ and unrealistic treatment of historical events. On the other hand, some of Yugoslavia’s internationally recognised films were made during the same period (1975–1989): Lordan Zafranović’s Okupacĳa u 26 slika (Occupation

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in 26 tableaux, 1978), Pad Italĳe (The fall of Italy, 1981) and Večernja zvona (Evening bells, 1986); and Emir Kusturica’s Otac na službenom putu (When father was away on business, 1985), the winner of the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) for best feature film at the Cannes Film Festival. See Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema – The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001, expanded ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 156. 59. Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 6–7. 60. Ibid. 61. For illustrative purposes, we mention one of the numerous contributions to the debate on the theme of popular/mass culture, which the Yugoslav radical and Republic leaderships conducted as early as at the end of the 1950s, when the strong influence of ‘mass culture’ from the West was being noticed: ‘The mass culture of the West reduced man’s cultural need to leisure, and soc-realism reduced it to upbringing in the spirit of strictly dictated State rules. There the conductor is the market, here the State… If the production of mass culture is “a Taylorisation of social lies”, what is “sugar-coating”? Isn’t it the same? Yes, there is a difference: it lies in the fact that nobody wise would consider the serial production of mass culture in the West to be art, while here the product of the “candy store” is pronounced to be art, and, in addition, to be the new socialist art’. Antun Žvan, ‘Masovna kultura i kulturna potreba’ (Mass culture and cultural need), Naše teme (Our issues) vol. 13, no. 8 (1969): 1330–1337, there 1335. 62. Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, New York: Routledge, 1999. 63. Đuro Plemenčić, ‘Televizĳske serĳe o ratu i revolucĳi’ (Television series on war and revolution), in Rat, revolucĳa, ekran (War, revolution, screen), eds. Stevo Ostojić et al., Zagreb: Spektar, 1977, 143–152, there 146. 64. Cole, Selling, 15. 65. Aware that feminist activity in socialist society demanded the seeking out of one’s own priorities and modalities of women’s autonomy, and that the women’s organisation (the Federal and Republic Women’s Conference) barely had any role in public life, the leading feminist intellectuals in Ljubljana, Belgrade and Zagreb (the ‘Women and Society’ section within the Sociological Society of Croatia) organised their own debating clubs, theory seminars and SOS hotlines; they started to publish the first feminist texts and columns in the socialist press. See Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi; Slavenka Drakulić, Smrtni grĳesi feminizma (The mortal sins of feminism), Zagreb: Znanje, 1984. 66. Feldman, ‘Uz dvadeset godina’, 8. 67. Drakulić showed that ‘the mortal sins of (neo)feminism’ in Yugoslavia came from the fact that it had ‘sprouted’ in developed capitalist countries: ‘It is also interesting that neofeminism and the women’s movement in the framework of western societies stemmed from the developments in ’68 and were considered progressive, revolutionary, connected with the Le , the labour movement, Marxism and Socialism. However, in Yugoslavia, feminism suddenly becomes a conservative and suspicious business… How is it possible that the ideas that contained [the seeds] of a highly galvanised progressive movement brought forth… such a ro en fruit when planted in this soil?’ Drakulić, Smrtni grĳesi, 107. 68. Vesna Kesić, ‘Dvadeset godina poslĳe’ (Twenty years a er), Kruh i ruže no. 10 (Winter 1999): 37–38. 69. Drakulić, Smrtni grĳesi, 108–111; Ramet, ‘In Tito’s Time’, 103. 70. Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svĳet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja (Home and the world), Zagreb: Centar za ženske studĳe, 2008, 34–42. 71. John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, London: Hurst, 2000; Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History, London: Hurst, 1999; Sabrina P. Ramet, Balkan Babel, 4th edn, Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002, 1–77; David B. MacDonald, Balkan Holocaust? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,


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2002, 132–159, 251–270; Ivo Žanić, Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of the War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1990–1995, London: Saqi, 2007. 72. For the notion of ‘beautiful soul’, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 4. 73. Ivan Aralica, Četverored, Zagreb: Znanje, 1997, 141–144. 74. See also Klaus Theweleit, ‘The bomb’s womb and the genders of war’, in Gendering War Talk, eds. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollaco , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 283–315. 75. See note 6. 76. The reference is to the accusations made in the Večernji list (The evening paper) by the columnist Josip Pavičić, to which the film critic Nenad Polimac replied with counter-arguments in Jutarnji list, another Zagreb daily: ‘What elevates the Ratkajevi to a phenomenon is the subversive concept of merging a soap-opera with an extremely serious historical theme. When have you ever had an opportunity in a domestic production to watch scenes in which an Ustasha government minister is crazy about his Jewish wife and constantly insists on a sadomasochistic relationship?… And, for that ma er, when have you seen a soap in which lesbian relationships dominate to such an extent… in which one incessantly hears feministic tirades (“Men! As soon as they get their hands on power, they forget how they arrived at it!”). The Ratkajevi serial – at least in our circumstances – really is a provocative soap-opera, which is watched by diverse strata of viewers out of the most diverse motivations’. Polimac, ‘Endehazĳa’, 77. 77. Plemenčić, ‘Televizĳske serĳe o ratu i revolucĳi’, 77. 78. There are frequent male/female arguments about the priority of war time and life choices and the price of personal sacrifices in the name of blind obedience to the dictates of the Party. An example are the lines of the main heroine, Helena, when her intended, the leader of the movement, is ‘capable of fighting for the fate of an entire nation, but cannot accept responsibility for his conduct towards me’ (episode 136, shown on 15 April 2008). The female approach to this dilemma is expressed by Lisa: ‘My religion is love, and yours is the Party and the Partisans!’ (episode 139, shown on 18 April 2008). 79. h p://www.forum.hr/showthread.php?t=258217&page=192 (last accessed 15 March 2009). 80. Only three of the articles among the seventy or so in the 680-page publication, Antifašizam na Buzeštini: Narodnoslobodilački pokret 1941–1945, were signed by women. Besides, only one woman [sic] – Marica Vrbanac from Pula – was included among the numerous speakers at the ‘ceremonial assembly’ in Rašpor, 7 August 2004, dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of the first regional Conference of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front. See Jakovljević, ed., Antifašiz am na Buzeštini. 81. R. Jambrešić Kirin and R. Senjković, ‘Sjećanje žena na njihov angažman u Drugom svjetskom ratu: terensko istraživanje u Istri 24–29 08 2004’ (Women’s memories about their engagement in the Second World War: Fieldwork in Istria 24–29 August 2004). IEF rkp. 1877 and IEF rkp. 1878, (Manuscript Nr. 1877; 1878). Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb. 82. Alistair Thomson, M. Frisch and P. Hamilton, ‘The Memory and History Debates: Some International Perspectives’, Oral History 25th Anniversary Issue, vol. 22, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 33–43, 42. 83. Doris Lessing as quoted in Joanna Bourke, ‘Introduction. Remembering War’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 39, no. 4 (2004): 473–485, there 478. 84.. For similar reflections on the phenomenon of memory, see Geoff Eley, ‘Introduction’, in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, eds. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn, Oxford and New York, Berg, 1997, vii–xiii, there vii. For the contemporary obsession with memories, see Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, ‘Introduction: Noises of the Past’, in The Work of Memory. New Di-

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rections in the Study of German Society and Culture, Idem eds., Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2002, 1–21. 85. Jambrešić Kirin and Senjković ‘Sjećanje žena’, IEF rkp. 1877. 86. Ibid. 87. See Reana Senjković and Davor Dukić, ‘Virtual Homeland’, International Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 8, no. 1 (2005): 44–62. 88. Lydia Sklevicky, Emancipacĳa i organizacĳa. Uloga Antifašističke fronte žena u postrevolucionarnim mĳenama društva i kulture [NR Hrvatska 1945–1953] (Emancipation and organisation. The role of the AFŽ in the post-revolutionary social and cultural changes [People’s Republic of Croatia 1945–1953]), unfinished PhD thesis, Zagreb, 1989. Manuscript Nr. 1444, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb. See further Biljana Kašić, ‘Lydia Sklevicky (1952–1990)’, in A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006, 517–520. 89. Slavoj Žižek, Sublimni objekt ideologĳe (The sublime object of ideology), Zagreb: Arkzin, 2002, 11. 90. For a detailed account of the treatment of women, most of them former Partisans, in the Yugoslav prison-camps Goli otok and Grgur, see: R. Jambrešić Kirin, ‘Šalje Tito svoje na ljetovanje!: kažnjenice u arhipelagu Goli’ (Tito sends his own people on vacation! Female prisoners in the Goli Archipelago), in Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svĳet, 80–124. 91. To mention the most prominent among them: the Center for Women War Victims; the Residential Project For Women Refugees – The Rosa House; and the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia, as well as many self-help groups established for women in more than twenty refugee camps in Croatia. See Vesna Kesić, Vesna Janković and Biljana Kašić, eds, Women Recollecting Memories. The Center for Women War Victims Ten Years Later, Zagreb: The Centre for Women War Victims, 2003. 92. See, for example, Reana Senjković, ‘Motherland is Female Gender’, Narodna umjetnost, Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research vol. 39, no. 1 (2002): 133–150. 93. Andrea Pető, ‘Stories of Women’s Lives: Feminist Genealogies in Hungary’, in Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe: Historical Perspectives on Womanhood and Manhood in [the] 19th and 20th Century, eds. Miroslav Jovanović and Slobodan Naumović, Series Zur Kunde Südosteuropas II/33, Belgrade and Graz: Udruženje za društvenu istorĳu and Institut für Geschichte der Universität Graz, 2002, 211–218, there 211.