Bleiburg kao kulturna trauma
Bleiburg as Cultural Trauma

Summary/Abstract: Since Croatia’s independence, Croatian society has been antagonized by the issue of Yugoslav history. The point of contention on which society is divided into two almost irreconcilable camps concerns the interpretation of events after World War II and the mass liquidations, known as the Bleiburg Tragedy, of members of the defeated army of the Independent State of Croatia that began with their surrender at the small town of Bleiburg in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia. The topic of these liquidations was something of a taboo in Yugoslavia, which was governed by the Communist Party, but Croatian anti-Yugoslav emigrants constructed them as cultural trauma by linking them to the loss of “homeland” from a position of exile. This paper focuses on an analysis of the narrativization of the Bleiburg tragedy that creates emotions, constructs ideological phantasm and builds meanings for these post-war events as points of collective memory of Croatian political emigration. The analysis is based on articles dealing with this topic in the magazine Hrvatska revija from when it was published in Argentina. It also questions the way in which such structured cultural trauma antagonizes the social field after it enters the Croatian public space by revising common memories.

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