The Dark Side of Transnational Mobility: Croatian Travel Writers in Hitler’s New Europe

Travel Writing, War Reporting, and Hybridity

Wendy Bracewell has written that hybridity is inherent to the travel-writing genre. ⁷ Hybridity was also a distinguishing feature of travel writing in wartime Europe, which combined elements of travelogue with war reporting. As Charles Burdett has demonstrated, this hybrid form flourished in the travel literature of Fascist Italy. Throughout the interwar period and into the Second World War, Italian journalists, intellectuals, and writers composed numerous accounts of journeys through diverse societies, including the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the United States, and Mussolini’s African empire. Combining the bombastic characteristics of war reporting with the voyeuristic pleasures of travel writing, they were enthusiastically embraced by the Italian reading public. ⁸ In the case of Nazi Germany, Rudy Koshar has argued that while Nazi travel writing was a distinguishing feature of the individual, it also spoke to the collective barbarism of the Nazi state. In wartime, a new form of travel literature emerged in which “the desire for travel competed with the military and racist goals of the regime, creating friction between ‘fun’ and politics and between individual desire and state goals.” Holiday brochures such as the 1940 Woerl tourist guidebook for the city of Posen, Illustrierte Führer durch die Gauhauptstadt, brought home the chilling duality of Nazi travel culture, combining lively descriptions of the booming tourist industry in the city with euphemistic references to General Plan East and the persecution of the Jews. The Baedeker guide, meanwhile, published in 1942, made references to both the Final Solution and the economic and demographic re-organization of Poland. ⁹ German war correspondents also wrote travelogues about the new Europe, including some about Croatia such as Hermann Ginsel’s 1942 study. ¹⁰

Few, if any, travel guides were produced by the Croatian state. What was published, however, was several books and numerous features in journals, magazines, and newspapers that emulated this hybrid genre. Urban educated readers were the primary target audience for these publications since nearly two-thirds of the population was illiterate. ¹¹ To overcome this problem, in September 1941, the Ministry of Education launched an ambitious mass literacy campaign. ¹² By the end of 1941, Grga Pejnovic, the head of the Ustasha propaganda office, was expressing the aspiration that within a year every citizen would be capable of reading the official Ustasha almanac, then in the planning stage. ¹³ In the meantime, the National Institute for Cinema, Croatia Film, brought propaganda newsreels and feature films direct to illiterate communities in remote rural locations via mobile cinema units run by enthusiastic amateur cineastes. Since these mobile film units were necessarily limited in scope and number, it also embarked on a programme to construct cinema halls in small towns and villages across the state. ¹⁴

Travel writing in Croatia functioned as a form of propaganda. Through its descriptions of the sights, sounds, and attractions of European states, it sought to emphasize the benefits membership of the alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had brought to Croatia. Insofar as it normalized the brutality of a new Europe defined by slave labour, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, it aimed to justify the violence of the Ustasha state. However, even non-ideological Croatian travel writing that merely conveyed the wonder of travel served the propaganda demands of the state since it implied that being a citizen of the Croatian state and the new Europe meant mobility and opportunity. ¹⁵ Like all literature, books about travel had to be approved by the state’s censorship office whose officials often made quixotic and eccentric decisions about what could be published. Being an Ustasha writer or one at least favoured by the regime was no guarantee of escaping the censor’s pencil. Even after this hurdle had been passed, a writer might still find themselves a victim of cancel culture at the hands of zealous party members or offended members of the public. ¹⁶

Although much of the travel writing discussed below was produced by prominent Ustasha intellectuals, by no means all of it was. As was the case in many satellite states, initially Croat writers not ideologically attuned to the Ustasha movement nonetheless paid lip service to the state’s orthodoxies and participated in its cultural activities. For many writers, cultural engagement meant the difference between economic survival and destitution since literary awards and commissions were not only relatively lucrative but one of the few ways in which writers could earn income in an economy characterized by shortages of basic goods and hyper-inflation. For much the same reason, otherwise ideologically uncommitted and indifferent writers accepted sinecures in state cultural, educational, and propaganda ministries. What relatively few of them did, however, was to become committed supporters, far less members, of the movement. Recognizing the importance of writers on the propaganda front, the regime engaged in various initiatives to win them over to the Ustasha cause. ¹⁷ Alongside threats, blackmail, and terror, travel writing came to represent in the early months of the new state especially a key instrument by which the regime sought to win the loyalty of ambivalent Croat intellectuals and members of the cultural elite. With their stories of travel to desirable destinations, accounts of prestigious conferences and projections of Croatian power and transnational respectability, writers such as Marko Čović and Ante Bonifačić hoped to underline the “club goods” of mobility, privilege, and opportunity that being part of the new Europe would bring for their peers both individually and as a professional class. ¹⁸

The Ustasha State and the “European Soul”

What did Europe mean in the context of the wartime Croatian state? What did it mean for an Ustasha writer or intellectual to share European values? For Julije Makanec, a professor of philosophy, speaking to Ustasha students in February 1944, becoming part of the new European meant inculcating a set of ideological and cultural values grounded in anti-materialism, the struggle against world Jewry and Bolshevism, and the very survival of the nation. “The name Europe signifies far more than the mere geographic term for a continent. In this war, Americanism and Bolshevism are marching together for the complete annihilation of the European soul and European way of life.” European values also vindicated the Ustasha programme of national cleansing since, as he explained, nationalism was the “natural expression of the European soul.” In any case, he asked, “what does Americanism have to oppose the European authoritarian idea? It opposes this concept with vulgar, gaudy, disorderly, meddlesome, soulless freedom to which we could give any name but freedom.” Furthermore, Makanec argued, the descending of “Stalin’s mechanized hordes from the depths of the Eurasian steppes to Europe would mean for all Europeans a catastrophe of world-historical proportions and irredeemable consequences.” In contrast to this, the Ustasha state had set out on an “explicitly European” path that navigated between “American plutocratic-liberalism with its economic and spiritual chaos” on the one hand and “the brutal tyranny of Bolshevism” on the other. ¹⁹

In his speeches as minister of education and as a philosopher, Makanec wrote extensively about European values, its connection to Croatian nationalism, and Croatia’s status in the new Europe. He rejected the notion that the Croatian state was a mere satellite of Nazi Germany. On the contrary, its friendship with Nazi Germany was recognition that Croatia was an independent state that “must declare, in the face of the new Europe, its will to join the European community not as some appendage, but as an equal member of the European family of peoples, as a nation-state in its own right.” ²⁰ For Makanec, who had acted as a pedagogical advisor to the Ustasha Youth organization between 1941 and 1942, becoming part of the new Europe signified something even more fundamental than that. As he wrote in the youth journal Ustaška mladež in the summer of 1942 in a report from the Weimar European youth festival, through its enthusiastic participation in the event, the Ustasha Youth organization had demonstrated that Croatia “is no longer a blockhead of Europe but is moving forward parallel with it.” ²¹

Events such as the arts and music festival in Weimar in the summer of 1942 provide an important window into the transnational mobility open to members of the movement in the four years of the state’s existence. Particularly before 1944, transnational travel and participation in pan-European organizations and festivals became a key part of the state’s identity. Croatian newspapers interpreted the attendance of members of the Ustasha Youth organization at the Weimar festival as a tangible sign of the state’s entry into a future European superstructure. Nova Hrvatska, for example, reported that youth representatives from seventeen European nations “which shoulder to shoulder are fighting with the Germans for a better future and a new just order in Europe” were represented at the event, noting approvingly that the centre of Weimar was “adorned with the flags of young European countries,” among them fluttering proudly “our own Croatian banner.” ²² After the establishment in Vienna of the Union of European Youth of which the Ustasha Youth organization had been a founding member, this Europeanizing discourse intensified.

Before this point, Ustasha Youth delegations had begun visiting fraternal youth organizations in Italy and other European states or hosting them in Croatia, but thereafter despatches about the foreign excursions of youth activists to participate in sports competitions, art festivals, and international camps became a staple feature of many newspapers and youth journals. Ustasha Youth members were just one of many cohorts within the movement enjoying transnational mobility. These ranged from young factory shock workers, film industry professionals, or police cadets offered work placements or sent on training courses abroad to the tens of thousands of Croats who volunteered to work in the Third Reich or students on exchange visits and long-term study through the DAAD and Humboldt-Stiftung or who were undertaking military training in the Wehrmacht. Moreover, Ustasha students who had served in elite Ustasha militias and death squads were selected to attend German Abwehr and Gestapo training schools. There were also a growing number of visits by Croatian student delegations and initiatives for exchanges, above all with Slovakian students and the NSDStB. Members of the artistic and cultural elite were also mobile, frequently appearing as guest artists with foreign opera, ballet, and theatre companies. Finally, the Croatian state’s entry into the envisaged future new European order and the establishment of embassies throughout Europe provided opportunities for a cohort of young and ambitious bureaucrats for travel and career progression.

From the other direction, wartime Croatia became the locus for various scientific, cultural, and professional exchanges, including hosting numerous European events and meetings which brought prestige and esteem. Cultural planners also sought to “Europeanize” the state festivals such as the 10 April celebrations while the Croatian state, like much of Southeastern Europe, became a laboratory for the economic, cultural, and social transformation of the continent by Nazi Germany. Teeming with German and Italian experts, the Croatian state found itself at the centre of the German plan to create a central European economic zone, a European federal union and, in time, fashion a European consciousness that went beyond the merely rhetorical. ²³ These kinds of transnational and transcultural exchanges also clearly provided journalists and writers with opportunities to experience the sights, sounds, and pleasures of the near abroad. Paradoxically for all its Europeanizing aspirations, overseas travel in wartime Croatia was limited to a small privileged cohort while travel inside the state was subject to draconian restriction; even for those professionals whose livelihood depended on internal mobility such as film industry workers, obtaining travel permits proved bureaucratic and challenging. Since the Ustasha state aspired to be a total surveillance state, it introduced a series of laws such as nighttime curfews and compulsory registration of visitors, designed to restrict population flows in and out of cities. Meantime, for the Jewish and Serb minorities, who were early on subject to ghettoization, mass registration, and daily curfews in towns and cities, travel within their own neighbourhoods, let alone the state, was made extremely difficult ²⁴

Seeing New Europe through Ustasha Eyes

Travel writing in wartime Croatia tended to fall into two categories: ideological writing that served to reinforce the Europeanizing discourse of the state and writing that seemed to be purely about the sights, sounds, and pleasures of the near and occasionally far abroad. Some of the latter travelogues had been written in the Yugoslav period but were only published after the establishment of the state. A case in point was Milan Begović’s travelogue, Put po Italiji (Journey through Italy), issued in 1942. ²⁵ Superficially, Begović’s book seemed to offer little support for the state’s simultaneously Europeanizing and nationalist discourses. His louche descriptions of various encounters in Italian cities were punctuated with references to the normality of everyday life in interwar Yugoslavia, and his travelogue expressed a pleasure-seeking, and hence materialistic, understanding of travel far removed from the sternly ideological narratives of nationalist Croatian travel writing. Worse, the foibles of German tourists were a target for Begović’s withering satire. On the other hand, Begović’s status as one of the most admired Croat novelists of the contemporary era meant that his work was appropriated by the regime as a “national” writer. Meanwhile, in a 1944 interview with the party newspaper Hrvatski narod about the new novel in his long-running, highly popular Giga Barićeva series about an intrepid and independent-minded Croat heroine, Begović declared approvingly that “our era is a firm foundation for the shaping of literature. New ideas, new men have emerged, a new social ambience has been created.” ²⁶ In addition, the frequent expressions of nostalgia for the native soil in Put po Italiji, irrespective of the fact that the homeland in question was then part of Yugoslavia, conformed to the narrative structure of wartime travel writing, which expressed admiration for the near abroad while at the same time placing it within a framework of national sentimentality.

While the Ustasha state often took a doctrinaire, sternly ascetic and even sanguinary view of travel, this was complicated by various initiatives that offered Croat workers, in particular, a vision of consumption and materiality in the form of workers’ summer resorts or cut-price holidays. ²⁷ At the time Begović’s book was published, its Italophile sentiments made geopolitical sense given Croatia’s uneasy alliance with Italy. In the early years of the state, Italy was depicted as a fraternal ally and fascist motherland by the Ustasha press despite the fact that it was occupying a large part of its Dalmatian Coast and subjecting the Croatian part of the population to a policy of forced Italianization. This changed dramatically after Fascist Italy collapsed in 1943 and the Croatian state reclaimed control of Dalmatia. Compare Begović’s travelogue, for example, with the one published two years later by Ustasha Youth leader Dragutin Gjurić. Reconstructed from his recollections of a training programme at the GIL Academy in Rome undertaken by youth under Gjurić’s leadership two years earlier, Kroz Hrvatske i strane zemlje (Through Croatia and Foreign Lands, 1944) was a barometer not only of changing public discourse on Fascist Italy, but Gjurić’s own views on Italy. Taken together with his despatches from Rome in 1942, they record a journey from eulogization to vitriolic contempt in less than three years. ²⁸

Of course, in their different ways, Begović and Gjurić’s travel notes were also comments on the homeland. In fact, in his book Gjurić not only referred frequently to Croatia but framed his personal experience of travelling in a foreign country through the lens of a Croat nationalist who now lived in his own independent state. For him, this enhanced his status from that of cringing tourist to proud traveller, changing his perceptions of being abroad. This was a common theme in Croatian wartime travel writing: using travel notes as a literary device through which to discuss the “privileged” status being a citizen of an independent state in the new Europe conferred. Much of this kind of travel narrative concerned fraternal states in East-Central Europe and the Balkans, where direct comparisons could more easily be made while also reflecting the burgeoning links between states in that region. The theatre impresario Marko Fotez’s travel notes about being a Croat in Bratislava in 1941 and poet Vinko Kos’s tour of Romania as part of a delegation from the Society of Croat Writers were good examples of this genre. ²⁹

These kinds of self-orientalizing tropes which Milica Bakić-Hayden has labelled “nesting orientalisms”—in this case emphasizing Croatia’s escape from the trap of Balkan backwardness to the modernity of new Europe—have long been a theme of Balkan travel literature. ³⁰ As Maria Todorova has written, while the Balkans became, in time, for Western visitors, “the object of a number of externalized, political, ideological and cultural frustrations,” serving as “a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the ‘European’ and ‘the west’ has been constructed,” Balkan self-identities constructed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were invariably opposed to “oriental others” such as geographical neighbours, regions within the Balkan area itself as well as those parts of one’s historical past that emphasized the orientalist legacy. ³¹ This resulted in travellers from both the east and west of Europe “coming to equate the concepts of modernity, progress and cultivation with Europe, their absence as barbaric, backward and oriental.” ³² As writers, politicians, and others from the region began to use the concept of Balkanization as a means of advertising their Europeanness, “Balkan” increasingly came to refer “to someone other than ourselves.” ³³

If Fotez’s Bratislava essay was witty and pleasure-seeking, Kos’s Romania nationalistic travelogue only implicitly ideological and Gjurić’s account of Italy open to interpretation, some Croatian writing framed travel in explicitly ideological terms not only as a means of announcing Croatia’s new geopolitical position but telegraphing the subjective journey the state was travelling. An early example of this approach was Ernest Bauer’s travel book about Marshal Ion Antonescu’s Greater Romania, Novo lice Rumunjske (The New Face of Romania, 1942). Bauer’s eulogization of Ionescu’s “moral revolution” and heroic leadership can be interpreted as references to the leadership cult of Ante Pavelić while his defence of Antonescu’s persecution of the Jews, in particular his programme of economic “Romanianization,” at a time when the Croatian state was implementing its own radical Aryanization programme was an analogy probably not lost on readers. ³⁴

Nonetheless, explicitly ideological travel accounts about travel in new Europe were surprisingly rare in wartime Croatia. Perhaps the most comprehensive was a collection of travel essays written by a group of journalists, writers, and artists who visited the Third Reich in 1941 at the height of the Ustasha “national revolution. Published in 1942 under the title Vidjeli smo Njemačku (We Saw Germany) by the State Directorate for Propaganda, the central essays in the collection were by Marko Čović, a writer and the editor of the prestigious literary journal Hrvatska revija, and the novelist Ante Bonifačić. The first took the reader through a fifteen-day tour by a delegation of Croat journalists, writers, and artists in Germany and Austria in the late summer of 1941 while the second described the tour of the Reich taken by members of the ESV and the subsequent meeting in Weimar. Both essays were notable for their self-orientalizing discourse that depicted Croatia emerging from the darkness of Balkan backwardness into the light of rapid modernization as an independent state, looking enviously at the level of development, modernity, and technological advance in Germany itself. At the same time, the essays expressed anxieties about Croatia’s status in the new Europe.

There was another common feature of these essays, reflecting the time period during which the writers visited the Third Reich: the war in the East. Both essays were recollections of visits that had been undertaken at the height of the Ustasha terror against the Serb, Jewish, and Roma communities: hence, at a time when Ustasha militias in the countryside were carrying out anti-Serb massacres in the countryside, Serbs, Jews, and Roma were being ghettoized and their assets Aryanized and Serbs and Jews were being deported to the state’s first concentration camps and, in the case of Serbs, being expelled en masse to Serbia through a system of “resettlement camps.” ³⁵ During the same period, Croatia had entered the war against the Soviet Union through the creation of a voluntary Croatian Legion to serve alongside other Axis volunteer units as part of Hitler’s crusade. In the case of Ćović’s essay, his definition of the East that Croatia was struggling against included the East within, in particular the oriental and unassimilable Serbs and his text conflated the Serb and Bolshevik Asiatic other. ³⁶ In Bonifačić’s vision, meanwhile, the war in the Soviet Union reinforced the nationalist metanarrative of the Croat as the “frontiersman” on the eastern border of the West, always at the crossroads of European history, an entangled meeting point between left and right—a metanarrative, it should be added, common to nationalists in most Central European nations. Simultaneously, it reinforced the idea that through struggle for Europe in the East, a true brotherhood of nations was being constructed in blood. In both essays—Čović’s explicitly and Bonifačić’s implicitly—the framing of Europe and the East can be seen as a means of legitimizing the cleansing of Croatia from “undesired elements.” ³⁷

The two-week trip to Germany and Austria that Marko Čović undertook alongside nineteen other artists and writers was organized at the invitation of the Reich minister for propaganda, Josef Goebbels. In his essay, Čović recalls that artists and writers “eagerly and enthusiastically” accepted the invitation to get to know the contemporary reality in Germany as guests of the Reich government, as he puts it, “to stay for fifteen days in a country of work and order, to get to know the virtues of the new order, to feel the power of the dearest ally of the Independent State of Croatia and to see how the constructors of the new Europe and the new world in these historical days carry out their sublime calling.” He and the other members of the delegation waited “impatiently” for the departure because they knew that they are setting off “for a new world which has been created from the effort, struggle and sacrifice of an entire people, a new world which has been created on the ruins of a poisoned, old Europe which had to die because it did not contain in itself enough vitality, justice or humanity since it was constructed on lies, deception and injustice.” A recurring theme in Čović’s travelogue is the idea that with the establishment of the Ustasha state, the Croats are entering into a new Europe of progress and modernity in which Croatia will be among the leading cohorts. He concedes that the excursion by artists and writers to Germany is arduous, if pleasant, but adds that despite the impressive sights and advances he and the rest of the touring group encounter in Germany, the trip has, paradoxically, increased his feeling that “we are representatives of a state, that we are sons of the Independent State of Croatia, the most beautiful homeland on the whole of the planet. To cross the border, to cross the state border, to cross the border of one’s own Croatian state! How many thoughts! How many memories! How many desires! How much faith! How many promises!” ³⁸

While he is in Germany, Čović takes copious notes of all kinds of aspects of everyday life as a model for the future development of the Croatian state. He is particularly impressed by the industry he sees around him and the condition of the highways in comparison to the condition of roads back home. “We look at the German roads. It is delightful to see how cars and wagons pass quickly along these perfect roads but leave behind themselves no trace and don’t get lost in a cloud of dust.” Yet he adds: “And we will have this too! We must have this too. . . . The Poglavnik’s Croatia, Ustasha Croatia, will be the most organized and beautiful country because this beloved country is being put in order and constructed by the Ustashas.” The phrase “being put in order”—a recurring expression in the Ustasha lexicon—like many others was also a reference to the campaign of demographic engineering and reordering then underway in Croatia. From his doctrinaire point of view, even tourist sites have an ideological resonance. For instance, the party is shown around the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. Čović, possibly with the sanguinary and socially transformative Ustasha “revolution of blood” in mind, uses this to explain to readers the revolutionary tendencies of National Socialism and its determination to sweep away violently the hierarchies of the past. In the new world under construction, he wrote, there would be no more kings or emperors and their palaces would be “silent monuments” to a former era, a symbolic reminder of a time when select individuals possessed everything and the majority of the population did not have enough. He includes Croatia in the glittering future held out by National Socialist Europe. “New men are marching firmly, decisively and irreconcilably into a new future, a new order, a better, healthier, more beautiful, valuable and more just human future. Our Croatia is on this path under the sure leadership of the Poglavnik.” ³⁹

One of the cities that makes the greatest impacts on Čović is the town of Magdeburg in Saxony-Anhalt, not least because of its “wonderful, historic, masterfully-directed ‘German Legends’ exhibition.” But as well being a “wonderful and unforgettable” exhibition, he sees a message in it for Croatia about the rebuilding of Croatia following liberation from Serbian rule. “We must toil, we must carry out so much work to destroy all that which the Serbs in the past twenty years falsely and tendentiously built to our detriment,” he writes. “The Serbs used all their capabilities to steal from us everything that they could morally and materially, in the past and in the present. Their historical lies were so egregious and so enormous and vulgar that only Byzantine conmen and turncoats could invest in them. Our years in Yugoslavia were atrocious! This Serbian system of wiping away anything that was Croatian was terrible. One still sees residues of it and it will be visible until we have removed all these remnants.” As the group travel through the countryside in overflowing trains, they see women working in the fields, replacing the men who are away on the Front, but even in these disordered times, German order remains “exemplary.” As they look out of the window, he notices something else about the people working in the fields. “We still remember how the Serbs threatened that they would get all the way to Berlin. Actually, the heroes didn’t lie. Alongside the railway lines and in the suburbs of the cities we look at the Serbs as they work, dig, clean. The heroes did reach Germany and even Berlin as—prisoners. That’s the only difference.” He notes the physical features of the Russian prisoners of war and forced labourers. “The Soviets are also digging by the side of the streets. Horrible faces! Wild, mongol physiognomies. And they also got to—Berlin. How miserable and cowardly they are! And these are the bearers of culture, the apostles of freedom, the guards of human happiness and—an earthly paradise.” In this way, he links the peoples of the Soviet East and the East within together as a common, dehumanized enemy deserving a common fate. ⁴⁰ After arriving in Berlin, they are met at the station by representatives of the Croatian embassy including Luka Fertilio, the cultural attache. The visit to the embassy in Berlin makes a particular impression on the young novelist, specifically because of what it represents.

When a person first steps into a building that is called the first embassy of the Independent State of Croatia, one feels in one’s soul how it grows, how it ascends and rises, how proud and gleeful it is, when at every step one feels the reality of the eternal dream, when one sees the realized ideal of numerous Croatian generations. The first embassy of the Independent State of Croatia! How much these words mean! A state! A Croatian state! An Ustasha state! The Poglavnik’s state! Sons of the future Croatia, those who come after us, will never be able to understand what our independent Croatian state meant for those of us who were born and grew up in a foreign state!

They go to Potsdam and visit the Sansouci palace with its memories of Voltaire and Friedrich the Great. Here, Čović takes a very different attitude compared to the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. He enthuses about the opulent venue, seeing in it a symbol of European culture on the borderlands of East and the Soviet Union. “Luxurious halls, countless rooms, precious valuables, the radiance, the luxury of historical values! Great days! Beautiful days! In the East the fate of humanity is being decided!” Looking around a museum showcasing ancient weaponry, he comes across a Serbian soldier without a helmet. Among the many flags, he notices that the Soviet and the Serbian flags are next to each other, something, he tells readers, is not a coincidence. They then visit a very different kind of venue, the monument to the Fallen Hero that is guarded eternally. This, too, provokes in his mind resonances of the struggle in the East and the East within and the struggle that the Croat warrior has made for both. “Nearby the honour guard of the fallen hero! Wreaths with beautiful and wonderful powerful inscriptions which speak about the monumental strength of a people who use all their amazing fortitude in the struggle for the victory of the new world and new man. People arrive at the memorial place and greet each other with a raised right hand. Remembrance for heroes, for victims who, with their blood, sanctified and stamped the foundations of the new order. In this moment, I remembered all the heroes who are sacrificing their lives for the progress of humanity, I recalled the wonderful, purest sacrifices which the Croat people have given, I recalled our giants and heroes, I remembered our Ustasha blood sacrifices. Our lips silently whispered the sacred words: they are with us!” ⁴¹

The European Writers’ Union and the Building of European Brotherhood

The notion that the creation of new Europe had forged new bonds of fraternal solidarity was a recurring narrative of fascist writers across the wartime continent, and Croat writers, intellectuals, and activists were no exception. Consider, for example, the despatch sent by Matko Peič, a student at the Academy of Art in Zagreb and Ustasha Youth delegate from Požega attending a youth art festival and competition in Florence in late 1942. In his report for Plava revija, he describes the Italian city as pulsating with the activity of young fascist activists from across Europe, making frequent comparisons between his home city and Florence. Despite being an accomplished teenage artist, Peič writes very little about the festival, focusing instead on the atmosphere of European solidarity and fascist fraternalism that the festival has engendered among its youthful attendees who in the evening, after art classes are finished, gather in the hotel foyer to socialize and exchange ideological mementoes, discuss national writers, and sing each other’s songs. ⁴² While Peič makes the obligatory references to the homeland and the elevated status of Croatian literature and culture in the new Europe (the poet Vladimir Nazor is revered by all the boys; Peić’s Sevdalinka renditions receive the rowdiest applause), at the centre of the narrative is the story of how European brotherhood is forged during the festival. This brotherhood both recognized the differences between European peoples while emphasizing their common European identity in opposition to their eastern and Anglo-American enemies. ⁴³ Similarly, in the case of Ante Bonifačić’s description of his attendance at the inaugural meeting of the ESV in October 1941. Bonifačić was one of the most prolific of the cohort of nationalist writers to emerge in the interwar period. Like Kivimaa, he was initially a modernist and had studied at the Sorbonne. A supporter of Yugoslavism in the 1920s, he increasingly moved to the nationalist right during the 1930s, becoming a regular contributor to right-wing literary and cultural journals. After the Ustasha movement came to power, he was appointed head of the cultural section of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and while he produced few new literary works wrote regular essays for Hrvatska revija and the party’s intellectual newspaper, Spremnost. In 1941, he was appointed secretary of the Croatian national group of the ESV, attending not only the founding meeting at Weimar, but also the tour around Germany and Austria which preceded it.

In his speech opening the Week of German Writers during which the meeting took place, Josef Goebbels made a direct link between the struggle to incarnate a specifically European literature and the sacrifice of German soldiers on the battlefields of the East. “Once again the bodies of our soldiers stand protecting an ancient cultural legacy which, illuminated by the light of humanity, must be eternally maintained. What, in contrast, does the vacuous and insipid prattle of uncultivated writers mean, defending a sterile civilization, which is not worth living, far less dying for? We have never taken it seriously and don’t take it seriously today either.” In tying the creation of a new European literature so closely to the “struggle” against the Jews, he argued that this project could only be realized if German literature enjoyed a hegemonic position. “We know that your work must be and is based on particular national and individual biases,” he told the assembled writers. But Europe as a continent of isolated states would never be capable of life. Instead, he argued, only German-led European unity would enable the rebirth of national cultures by blocking the Bolshevik advance and defeating plutocratic capitalism, “the true enemy of European cultural diversity led by the determining, direction-giving role of Jewry . . . in all countries.” ⁴⁴

From the outset, the ESV carried an aura of unreality and was created in the shadow of terror. Just eight kilometres from Weimar, the cradle of the German renaissance, was the concentration camp of Buchenwald, the perimeter fence of which contained a huge oak where, it is said, Goethe used to sit and contemplate. While delegates took tea at Schloss Weimar, listened to chamber music, or dined at the lavish Elephant Hotel, humans were being systematically exterminated. ⁴⁵ Although the ESV was portrayed by the German and collaborationist press as the autonomous initiative of European writers, the fact that it was funded and created by the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda and structured to emphasize German control ensured that by the time of the second meeting in October 1942, much of the enthusiasm and idealism had long since dissipated. Despite the hysterical speeches of Nazi writers like Gerhard Schumann who promised to realize Germany’s vision of a multi-national Europe by saving its culture from “the rage of the Asiatic hordes of the Steppes,” Italian attendees such as Mario Sertoli reported that the meeting was characterized by “an apathetic and sleepy atmosphere” as “audiences napped or yawned” during the German speeches. If some members of the ESV were urbane, multilingual intellectuals, many of the novelists at Weimar specialized in nationalistic novels set in the countryside or among peasants and had little cultural influence outside their homeland. Wilhelm Haegert, a ministerial adviser and head of the section for propaganda in the RMVP, was undeterred. In his speech at the 1941 meeting in Weimar he argued that these writers were the “intellectual elite of European nations” since European literature was composed of national literatures. As the writers who could most authentically express their nation’s spirit, they could be called European. ⁴⁶

This line of reasoning did not impress the Italian delegates. Sertoli, a writer and fascist functionary, complained that the conference “had the look of a folkloristic or ethnographic gathering, between Balkan and Scandinavian; a little world of the literary village, of country poets and provincial writers, a fair for the benefit of obscure men, or a festival of the ‘unknown writer.’” Essayist Giaime Pintor concurred, writing to his parents that “the European writers gathered in Weimar constituted the most numerous assemblage of idiots that I have ever seen together.” His fellow conference participants were “at a very low level, mostly Scandinavian and people from the Balkans, with whom it was impossible to talk about literature.” Some German delegates were equally unimpressed. In a letter to Hans Carossa, president of the ESV, Borres Frieherr von Münchhausen wondered what possible connection there could be between Goethe and “the Croat and Slovak poets on whom the previous issue of Europäische Literatur reports so lovingly.” He added waspishly: “I believe in a European literature as little as I do in a European hair colour. Literature is, after all, language and can therefore never be supra-state or international.” ⁴⁷

This orientalizing of European writers from poorer, less developed often Slavic countries by German and Italian writers reflected more general attitudes to the smaller states of the new Europe. In the case of Croatia, a condominium state divided between German and Italian occupation zones, this mindset not only included the exploitation of the state’s natural resources and economy and attempts to shape Croatian culture, society, and economy according to German and Italian fascist models but also the often-undisguised disparagement of the local Croat population as “savage” and “primitive.” Behind the official discourse of fraternalism and shared values, German officials often expressed contempt for the sanguinary atrocities of Ustasha militias, which they linked to the country’s Balkan backwardness. ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, Fascist Italy’s occupation of much of Dalmatia between 1941 and 1943 was justified with reference to Italy’s civilizing mission to tame and refashion the atavistic Slav population. ⁴⁹

Still, in October 1941 Bonifačić seemed enthusiastic enough. In his essay, he interpreted the new Europe as the rebirth not just of a continent but a laboratory where the European mindset was being refashioned. He vividly evoked the sense of fraternal European brotherhood he encountered during the conference, living among the other writers in Weimar. These included the Norwegian writer Kåre Bjørgen; Felip Luis Vivance, the editor of the review Escortal in Madrid; and the Finnish journalist Arvi Kivimaa, who had come to Goethe’s town “straight from the battlefield.” Bonifačić wrote that in socializing with so many different European writers he felt an immediate sense of brotherhood with them, speculating that their shared, intertwined history provided them with a deep spiritual connection. In this sense, the Croatian past, as well as the present, justified its inclusion in the new Europe.

I feel at home among Europeans because I know that all our history is intimately connected with their fate as well as our future. Besides us sits Bruno Brehm, the writer of the novel Apis und Este, who was born in Ljubljana and has come from the Russian Front—a connoisseur of Gospić and Ogulin and an expert on Sarajevo and Varaždin. Across my table is Karl Rothe and dear Hans Baumann, who proudly carries his iron cross, earned in the great skirmish at Velikiye Luki and by whom this week was presented in the Vienna Burgtheater the drama Der Turm Nehaj (The Fortress of Nehajgrad). There, our Uskoks are shown as models of heroism and duty and I could almost cry stealthily because Baumann doesn’t know the wonderful verses that come to mind because of his title. Perhaps Mirko Jelušić, who is as much ours as he is German, would feel this. It is enough just to look at his face. Our Dubrovnik is equally as well known to our German colleagues as it is to us. Europe has numerous places where the human spirit has pitched its tent. Every one of these places, overwhelmed with the strength of his spirit, lifts us beyond borders and nationality in a great cultural union, in a true spirit of brotherhood. ⁵⁰

Listing the great cultural cities of Europe that had produced works of art and that belonged to all Europeans, he asked: “What would be left of us if we lost the very thing that makes us Europeans? In this fatal moment of human history, when the greatest hordes of all time have made themselves ready so that we are squeezed from the old European hearth and shudder listening to Iphigenia in the Weimar theatre while they covet the Dutch coast of eternally human, eternally European beauty!” Fortunately, Bonifačić explained, the battlefields of Russia would give birth to a new European spirit, adding that it was not possible to destroy a people that had printed 250 million books in a year, for whom more than one hundred of the greatest literary names were fighting on the Front against Bolshevism and for whom “young people descend like archangels onto the high mountains of Crete.” Outside Europe, barbarism prevailed and while millionaire Wall Street bankers and half-Jewish lords of the City spoke about saving democracy and civilization, they knew that they were lying, aiming only to suffocate the human community; they were “international parasites” who sold “human work and human blood” for gold. The European intelligentsia, by contrast, was conscious of its role in the new era as well as in the Union of European Writers. He listed the various pan-European collaborations that had emerged from their contacts with each other: Hans Baumann had become as close as a “dear relative” while the Spanish writer Ernesto Giménez Callabero, who the next day was due to journey with the Franco Blue Division to the Eastern Front, was consumed in a “comradely conversation” with his German counterpart Moritz Jahn. Meanwhile, John Knittel had turned down a trip to Africa to see hundreds of writers and poets from across the entire Reich and for a few days at Weimar got to witness the past and envisage the advance of the future. Veit Bürkle was preparing the first translation of Croat writer Mile Budak’s novel Ognjište into German that would surely cut a swathe through the seventy-two million fiction books published that year so far in the Reich.

In the organized state built on the model of National Socialist Germany, he insisted, everyone had their function. For his part, the poet had the role of capturing and preserving the richness of life and its deepest sources of beauty. But most of all perhaps in the present era he would help create the multi-faceted and diverse European of the future which Bonifačić saw as a melting pot of cultural influences. “What [Sudeten German novelist Hans] Watzlick, Jahn and [Anton] Schnack do, every one for their region, individual European writers will do for their homeland and altogether will create a wonderful and multicoloured mosaic of the great European community. A bouquet of Rhenish wine will join together with a French champagne, a Spanish malaga, an Italian chianti and our [Dalmatian] Dingač.” The war in the East, with its violence and sacrifice, was an integral part of this process, he wrote. “The blood of the greatest and most beautiful among us which has been synthesized together in Russian mold will give rise to, along with the most fertile Russian plains, the brotherhood of the European peoples.” ⁵¹

Wartime European Values in Retrospect

In the Cold War Europe of the 1960s, Arvi Kivimaa’s commitment to a new Europe was as strong as ever, though now he refashioned his previous support for the racial European values of National Socialism into a progressive European humanism. In 1962, as the vice president of the International Theatre Institute, he proposed 27 March as an annual Day of World Theatre on which an eminent figure in theatre or a “person outstanding in heart and spirit” from another field would be invited to share reflections on theatre or “international harmony.” Four years later, he observed that growing international connections “regardless of race and the form of society” were signs of the “strengthening of mutual understanding and the consolidation of peace.” ⁵² As this article has argued, the Europeanizing discourse of Croat travel writers worked in a similar way, aiming to recast the dehumanizing totalitarianism and terror of the Ustasha regime and National Socialist occupation as progressive, internationalist humanism. On the one hand, the European discourses created a space of normality in a state defined by terror and surveillance. Through travel writing in books and magazines and mobile film units in the countryside, Croat consumers could vicariously experience the sights, sounds, and pleasures of the world beyond their borders. As importantly, for those intellectuals who professed adherence to the Ustasha ideology or whom the state thought it could successfully co-opt, it promised opportunities for social mobility, international travel, and prestigious conferences with the new European intelligentsia. So integral to the validity of the wartime Croatian state and the Ustasha movement were the concepts of Europe and mobility that even determinedly non-ideological travel writing texts functioned as a form of propaganda. Meanwhile, the hybrid nature of much wartime Croatian travel writing, which combined the aesthetics of war reporting with the “one thing after another” structure of the travelogue, did not elide—any more than wartime German travel guides about the East—the barbarous reality of the Reich and new Europe. Quite the contrary. In such a way, travel writing on the war front aimed to provide legitimation for the campaign of ethnic cleansing on the home front.

At the same time, European discourses enabled the Ustasha movement and its supporters to present a transnational, modernizing future for the state as an important member of the new Europe. Coming to Europe meant leaving the primitiveness of the Balkans and entering a progressive, exciting era. Writers, journalists and activists, conveying their experiences of these encounters, were fundamental to the inculcation of this narrative. While self-orientalizing discourses conceding backwardness and expressing the desire for development up to the standards of the European mainstream were always present, wartime Croat travel writers also suggested that independent Croatia had much to offer the new transnational Europe of cooperation and open borders. If the war in the East was seen by Croat travel writers as a means to forge European brotherhood, the East was understood two ways. First, Croatia represented a frontier between the East and the West, with the Croats as a primordial bulwark against the barbaric East. Second, and more importantly, perhaps, was the East within. For the Ustasha movement the war in the East was not just a battle against Asiatic Bolsheviks but an existential struggle to cleanse the state of alien and invading populations of Serbs, Jews, and Roma and so-called anti-socials. As the travel writing about the Third Reich written at the height of the Ustasha terror demonstrated, insofar as this genre of literature aimed to showcase the stability and normality of the Croatian state, it often exposed its abnormality and violence. Furthermore, irrespective of whether it was written by authors who were ideologically invested in the Ustasha ideology or not, the Europeanizing discourse of Croat travel writers leaves important clues about the subjectivity of both the individual writers and the state they served. Rather than moving from Balkan darkness to European light, it seems more likely that the travelogues of Croat writers reveal the dark underpinnings of “European values” in the 1940s and beyond. ⁵³