Rory Yeomans,Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism,1941–1945

Reviewed by: Vjeran Pavlaković, University of Rijeka, Croatia

The fascist Ustasha movement established the Independent State of Croatia (NDH – Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) in April 1941 after inter-war Yugoslavia was invaded by Axis forces, and quickly began carrying out a ‘revolution of blood’ against foreign elements perceived as polluting the Croatian nation – Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and communist Croats. The NDH was defeated in the spring of 1945 by the multi-ethnic and communist-led Partisans, while its leadership either fled into exile or was liquated in post-war retributions known collectively as the Bleiburg massacres. During and after Croatia’s War of Independence (1991–1995), the Ustashas were rehabilitated by certain nationalist politicians and intellectuals and recast as Croatian patriots and anticommunists. Although no longer as vitriolic as during the 1990s, debates about Ustashas, Partisans and Chetniks (Serb extremists) are still present in the Croatian political arena. For this reason Rory Yeomans’s book on Ustasha cultural politics is a timely contribution on a subject which still calls for more nuanced research liberated from ideologically charged polemics. Unfortunately, despite the promising methodological approach and the impressive amount of primary source material consulted by the author, Visions of Annihilation falls short of delivering on its promise of explaining the Ustasha’s use of culture to mobilize the Croatian population in support of the regime and to justify their campaign of mass murder.

Yeomans bases his argument on two key points which challenge both communist and revisionist interpretations of the Ustasha movement. Firstly, the Ustashas were not monolithic in their ideology, but were divided regionally and between radical and moderate factions. Secondly, Yeomans argues that ‘under the Ustasha regime there was a symbiotic relationship between cultural politics and racial ideology’ (5). Moreover, in the introduction he outlines the several phases during which the NDH tried to implement its vision of a national revolution: the initial radical and extremely bloody phase immediately after the Ustashas took power, a more moderate approach beginning in the fall of 1941 when the regime tried to accommodate rather than exterminate those who were identified as opponents, and a return to radical politics in late 1944 during the final desperate throes of the state in the face of impending defeat.

Yeomans’s claim that the Ustasha regime’s cultural politics in fact mirrored its extremist ideology is sound, and undermines the arguments by Ustasha apologists that at least culture in the NDH can be spared being tarred with the brush of fascism. But rather than presenting a concise narrative of how the regime implemented its cultural politics, the book overwhelms the reader with a numerous anecdotes and examples culled from the press. Yeomans has clearly worked through a vast amount of periodicals published between 1941 and 1945, but unfortunately he does not effectively convey to the reader what is most relevant and what are simply comments in local papers. The chronological structure offered in the introduction is abandoned in the following six chapters without an explanation as to the choice of themes or their importance. Instead of beginning with a chapter explaining how the regime formally implemented its vision of culture (language reform, censorship, the structure of the Ministry of Culture, types of propaganda), this is provided only in Chapter 5. Yeomans clearly states that this is not a history of the Ustasha movement or the NDH, but some kind of chronological order would have helped if we are to understand how cultural policies changed as the regime shifted from radical to moderate phases and back again. By not systematically identifying the key institutions and actors who determined cultural policy, readers who are not themselves scholars of the NDH will find it difficult to keep track of the many journalists and contributors to various newspapers who provide the bulk of the book’s material.

And herein lies the book’s greatest weakness. By relying almost exclusively on Ustasha periodicals and publications, Yeomans’s construction of the NDH is a skewed one that is based upon the very newspaper articles he is analysing. An overview of the various publications in the NDH would have been useful, especially in identifying which newspapers reflected the regional differences Yeomans mentions in the introduction. The author should be commended for tackling such an extensive collection of primary source materials, but there are numerous secondary sources which would have strengthened his thematic analysis (gender representation in wartime propaganda, commemorative practices, youth movements) or provided an overview of media under the NDH (such as the research by Alen Labus and Mario Jareb). For a book that is hailed as ‘essential reading for scholars and students of the Holocaust’ on the back cover, there is no mention of Ivo Goldstein’s extensive work (or other books for that matter) on the fate of Jews in Croatia. Furthermore, by delving so deeply into the NDH’s media, Yeomans has missed some opportunities to draw comparisons with other fascist movements and similar cultural processes in other European states. The work by Paul Fussell, George Mosse and Jay Winter on cultural history and memory of the First World War could have provided greater insight into Yeomans’ exploration of the Ustasha’s cult of death and commemorative practices. The conclusion does attempt to compare the NDH’s cultural politics with those of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but many of these reflections could have come much earlier and with greater emphasis.

Despite the problematic structure of the book, there are gems buried within the text for those patient enough to wade through the morass of Ustasha journalism. The most interesting chapter explores the cultural politics of martyrdom and rebirth, which contributes to the understanding of the regime’s cultural reproduction of past sacrifices and the envisioned Croatian utopia of the future. The creation of a cult around the Black Legion’s fallen commander Jure Francetić epitomizes this process. Ultimately, Visions of Annihilation breaks new ground in research on the NDH but suffers from a lack of concision and a theoretical framework that would have given readers, especially those without previous in-depth knowledge of the region, a comparative perspective on Ustasha cultural politics and ideology.