Naslov
Bleiburg and national intimacy in Croatia

Autori
Kudra Beroš, Viktorija

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
Coming of Age on Earth: Legacies and Next Generation Anthropology: IUAES Congress 2020

Mjesto i datum
Zagreb, Hrvatska; online, 09.03.2021. - 14.03.2021

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
national intimacy ; 'Bleiburg tragedy' ; Croatian diaspora ; identity ; cultural trauma

Sažetak
Bleiburg, a small town in Austria, is a controversial site of memory for many Croatians. The commemoration of what is now known as ‘Bleiburg tragedy’, which happens every year in May, is seen by some media as ”the biggest neo-Nazi meeting in Europe” and by others as “the biggest site of victims of Tito’s partisans”. The Bleiburg tragedy refers to the surrender of Croatian forces which collaborated with Germany during the Second World War, to partisans. The majority of them were killed without trial, including civilians who accompanied them. In communist Yugoslavia, Bleiburg was hardly mentioned, but the stories about Bleiburg massacre have stayed partly within anti-Yugoslav Croatian diaspora, transmitted orally from one generation to the next, becoming part of their identity, cultural trauma which was taken for granted. As Croatia become independent state, after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, these stories entered the public sphere in Croatia, becoming a site of struggle, a site of unresolved past. Very often these narratives take highly emotional forms, generating a crisis by creating the two opposing camps. In this paper, inspired by Berlant’s work on national intimacies of the historical present, I examine the affective dimensions of identification which different stories about Bleiburg employ in contemporary Croatia. I ask: which fantasmic identifications are mobilized by these stories? ; how they contaminate different fields such as education, heritage and tradition? and finally to which future imaginaries they aim?

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Etnologija i antropologija, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

Napomena
PANEL 99: National intimacy, historical present and possibilities for new futures

POVEZANOST RADA