7 - Envisioning the “Other” East: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Muslims, and Modernization in the Ustasha State

Summary

The historical experience of the Second World War in Croatia from 1941 to 1945 was characterized by a kaleidoscope of ideological utopias, ethnic homogenization, and extreme violence. The memory of this historical experience is suitably described by Aleida Assmann's comparison of the “cooling of history's hot zone” and the incomplete transition from biographical memory to externalized and mediated memory. The new experience of war and political transition in Croatia in the 1990s has additionally spurred a reevaluation of the socialist culture of remembering the Second World War, in particular the role of intellectuals, which was often reduced to a conflict between left- and right-wing worldviews and the assignment of moral culpability. Nationalist intellectuals were often condemned as criminals and executed while the personal biographies of those who escaped this fate were defamed by accusations of treason and collaboration with the fascist and Nazi occupation authorities. Postsocialist historiography exposed the myth of Communist antifascism and shifted research interest to different and more complex ways of considering the Second World War period. An interdisciplinary approach rooted in analysis of archives and a wide diversity of printed sources yielded more nuanced answers and restored the memory of negatively portrayed national intellectuals. But the critical construction of these biographies continues to be a paradox: a commitment to national liberation and, at the same time, involvement in ethnically motivated crimes and acts of terror that no subsequent validation is capable of redeeming.

This chapter examines these paradoxical biographies through an analysis of intellectual engagement in the Ustasha state. Specifically, it explores the evolving and frequently contradictory attitudes of nationalist Croat intellectuals to Bosnia- Herzegovina and the position of Bosnian Muslims in both the state and the wider Croat nation. First, it describes the manner in which Croat national intellectuals brought to life the mythomoteur potential of blood and soil. It was also with the help of this cultural imaginarium that the belonging of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the state manifested itself. The chapter then focuses on the articulation of the ideas and stereotypes used in the state to bridge the traditional gap between the historical heritage of Western Catholicism and Islam.