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War Journalism as Literary Nonfiction: Frontline Stories by Joža Vlahović

The homeland war in Croatia (1991-1995), a unique experience for baby boomers and generation X in the native population, resulted with a relatively great production of various hybrid nonfiction genres ranging from war memoirs and autobiographies to diaries and war novels in the nineties. Majority have been considered marginal in the national literature until the appearance of what critics coined “real” war prose at the end of that decade and later. War journalism in the mainstream media (no social media at the time) was mainly facts reporting with a purpose to inform, mobilize and encourage general public. In order to report correctly some journalists had to visit the front line in logistically challenging and life threatening circumstances. Consequently, majority of war reporters were young eager journalists with no, or little, work experience, let alone writing skills, and war reports in mainstream media were dry and nowhere close to what might be considered literary nonfiction (also named creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction). With one exception. Joža Vlahović, considered the doyen of Croatian journalists, already over 60 when the war started, having had a long sound career as a reporter, leading columnist and the founder and the first editor-in-chief of a weekly “Danas” (Today) which had shaken the social scene in the eighties by severe critique of the socialist system, decided by the end of 1991. to put on the hat of a war reporter and use his reportage skills to convey what was known in journalist theory at the time under the name of human story. The result are short stories that fall into the wide area framed by new journalism, immersion journalism and narrative nonfiction. Hence, the research of these texts which were first published as war reports in 1991 in the newspapers and twenty years later gathered in the book of a significant title “That War Was Better”, is, by default, a multidisciplinary sharing of the methodological powers of literature science and communication science in an analysis of these nonfiction rare pearls that shed new light on Croatian war journalism and war prose.

journalism ; literary nonfiction ; war prose ; homeland war

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