Academic literature on the topic 'Croatian National songs'

In 1896 and 1897 Matica hrvatska published Croatian Folk Songs, in two books containing epic poetry. The Serbian public from the territory of Croatia and Dalmatia unanimously condemned this publishing venture, believing with good reason that those books contained only Serbian poems, named as Croatian, which in their opinion was untrue. These views could mostly be heard in Serbian newspapers from these areas (Srbobran, Dubrovnik, Srpski glas) where Serbian intellectuals presented opposing arguments for several years, sometimes moving the discussion from the cultural to the political field, because they believed that it is the intention to destroy the Serbian identity. The attempt to appropriate the Serbian national treasure by the Croats was supposed to supplement what was missing in the Croatian tradition, because in the 19th century folk poetry, especially epic one, was crucial for the creation of national identity. The discussion was very bitter, because it followed the discussion about the name of the Serbian language, without which this issue cannot be fully understood.

“Belgrade ‘Targets’ Find Unity ‘From Heaven,’” read the front-page headline of a somewhat staggered New York Times, only five days after NATO bombs began falling on Serbia. Instead of hiding in bomb shelters or, as US officials had hoped, rebelling against their government, Serbs were busy singing patriotic songs at public squares, throwing rocks at the Goethe Institute, wearing medieval Serbian military uniforms and carrying signs equating Bill Clinton to Ottoman emperors, Croatian fascists and Napoleon. Thus a population which had for years expressed nothing but discontent with its government suddenly became “unified from heaven—but by the bombs, not by God.” Uniting them “behind their soldiers, their Kosovo and even President Slobodan Milošević” was, Belgrade's then-Mayor explained, a seemingly incomprehensible mélange of “myth and superstition.”

The 1840 murder of a notable 19th century Bosnian dignitary Smail-aga Cengic immediately inspired strong artistic production in the South Slav literature and oral tradition. These narratives, comprising newspaper articles, oral epic songs, and particularly Ivan Mazuranic?s literary epics written in the manner of oral folk epic, presented and codified Smail-aga as a bloodthirsty tyrant whose ultimate aim was to terrorize and extinct his Christian subjects. In distinction, some marginalized local narratives and oral folk tradition, which will be examined in this article, remembered Smail-aga as a righteous and merciful lord, protector of his flock and a brave warrior. Thus, when we scrutinize several versions of oral songs about the death of Smail-aga recorded between 1845 and 1860, as well as later collected anecdotes from his native Herzegovina, it appears that his hostile portrayal in written literature was rather the contribution of the Serbian and Croatian Romantic nationalists around the mid- 19th-century than an actual popular perception of him among local people in the region that he lived with. In conclusion, the article advocates for a wider consideration of the overall polyphonic narrative tradition and the revitalization of traditional narratives that glorify values which transcend strict religious, ethnic and national divisions as a way of reimagining and revaluating relationship of the South Slavs towards the Ottoman heritage.

Background: Having lived for several centuries in areas with a polyethnic population, Croatian Rusyns and Ukrainians have repeatedly found themselves on the path of interethnic confrontation between Serbs and Croats. The events of the Serbo-Croatian War (1991–1995) were one of the peak moments of such confrontations in the Yugoslav state. The Serbo-Croatian War is the most favorite topic of Croatian historiography of the entire period of independence. However, the question about the state of the Croatian national minorities during the war was covered only by few researchers. Local researchers actually don't raise the issue of collaborationism in the 1990s. Purpose: to assess the extent of collaboration of Rusyns and Ukrainians with self proclaimed Serbian Krajina, to find out the nature, motives and causes of this phenomenon. Results: The Serbo-Croatian War of 1991–1995 was caused by the disintegration of the SFRY, Croatia's desire to secede from the Federation, and the presence of a large Serb minority on its territory that did not share that desire. Because of military campaigns at the end of 1991, Croatian Serbs completely sepa-rated from Croatia, taking a quarter of its territory under control, and proclaimed the formation of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. It occupied the territory where a large part of the non-Serb population lived. In particular, most of the descendants of immigrants from Ukrainian lands were in a city Vukovar, villages Petrovci and Mikluševci (Eastern Slavonia). The non-Serb population of Serbian Krajina (including Rusyns and Ukrainians) found itself on the path of a “Serbisation” policy of the occupied territories. So an occu-pation regime was established for Rusyns and Ukrainians of this region. Destruction, looting, rape, beatings, damage to the Greek Catholic Churches, “ethnic cleansing”, bru-tal killings of particular families – this is the list of actions of the new government. Territorial Defense headquarters were organized in each settlement occupied by the YPA and insurgent Serbs, which included individual Rusyns and Ukrainians who sympathized with official Belgrade. Due to active collaboration with Serbs, some Rusyns from Mikluševci lived well under Serbian authority. They opened shops, hotels, businesses. Individual Rusyns from Mikluševci, at the behest of local Serbs, tortured fellow villagers and helped to deport them. According to the expelled locals, the hardest thing for them was not to ac-cept the Serbian occupation itself, but the betrayal of their compatriots. There was also a forced collaborationism. Due to the compact location of Ukraini-ans in the border areas between Serbia and Croatia, during the war a large number of Ukrainian men were mobilized to the YPA or the Croatian forces, depending on the place of residence. In 1995, Croatia regained considerable territory during its armed operations. The return of Eastern Slavonia, where most Rusyns and Ukrainians lived, was to be done gradually and under the control of the UN Transitional Administration. During the process of reintegration a complex process of return of refugees and exiles, psychological normalization of social relations, and adaptation of people to new circumstances, has continued. After the reintegration of the Danube region, Croatia has failed to establish an effective mechanism for punishing war criminals. The so-called “Mikluševci’s process” gained considerable resonance. The case was directed against those who deported 98 and killed four people from Mikluševci in the spring of 1992 (all the victims were Rusyns). The investigation was constantly delayed, and the number of defendants decreased due to the deaths of suspects or lack of evidence. At the announcement of the sentence, only three ethnic Rusyns were present (other convicted had fled to Serbia and were inaccessible to the Croatian judiciary). So it turned out that only Rusyns were actually convicted for the war crime of genocide against the Rusyns. Thus, during the Croatian-Serbian war, the policy of the so-called Serbian Krajina, aimed at implementing the “Greater Serbia” plan, left Ukrainians no choice as to whom to support. However, even under such conditions, there were cases of collaboration between the Rusyn-Ukrainian diaspora and the Serbian occupation administration. If we omit forced collaborationism (mobilization into the ranks of the Serbian armed forces), then voluntary cooperation had various reasons: the desire to regain power lost as a result of the 1991 elections; nostalgia for socialist Yugoslavia and stability; as a means of resolving domestic conflicts and settling accounts with neighbors. Voluntary collaborationism among the inhabitants of Mikluševci and Petrovtsi did not become widespread. It was much less common among Ukrainians than among Rusyns – but this can also be explained by the much larger number of the Rusyns in the region. After the reintegration of the Danube, Croatia did not prosecute anyone for collaborationism, but mostly Ruthenians were convicted for “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”. However, this rather indicates the imperfection of the Croatian judiciary. Key words: Croatia, Rusyns, Ukrainians, Serbs, collaborationism, terror, Serbo-Croatian war. Biki, Đ., 2001. Rusyns of Mikluševci in the Homeland War of 1991. Mikluševci. (In Croatian) Burda, S., 1998. From the work of the Crisis Staff of the Union 1991–1993 (2). New opinion, 106, pp.43–45. (In Croatian) Bičanić, J., 1998. News about the return of expelled citizens of Petrovci. New opinion, 104, p.20. (In Ruthenian) Crime in Mikluševtsi, 2016. Documents. Center for Combating the Past. [online] Avialable at: https://www.documenta.hr/hr/zločin-u-mikluševcima.html [Accessed 15 july 2021] (in Croatian) Furminc, J., 1990. At the co-working of coexistence. New opinion, 88, p.2. (In Croa-tian) Jolić, S., 1993. “I have to find my sons grave”. New opinion, 98/99, p.13. (In Rutheni-an) Jurista, M., 1991. We have yours on guard. New opinion, 90/91, p.10. (In Croatian) Kiš, M., 1997. UNTAES Mandate and Reintegration. New opinion, 101/102, pp.7–8. (In Ruthenian) Kostelnik, V. and Takać, G., 2008. 40 years of the Union of Ruthenians and Ukraini-ans of the Republic of Croatia. Vukovar. (In Ruthenian) Lipovlyanians on the front line, 1992. New opinion, 92/93, pp.18–19. (In Ukrainian) Liskyi, B., 2002. Anton Ivakhniuk is a great Ukrainian–Croatian patriot. In: S., Burda and B., Gralyuk, eds. Ukrainians of Croatia: materials and documents. Zagreb, pp.62–73. (In Ukrainian) Malynovs’ka, O., 2002. Ukrainian diaspora in the South Slavic lands. In: S., Burda and B., Gralyuk, eds. Ukrainians of Croatia: materials and documents. Zagreb, pp.6–20. (In Ukrainian) Marijan, D., 2000. Yugoslav People's Army in the aggression against the Republic of Croatia 1990–1992 years. Journal of Contemporary History, No. 2, pp.289–321. (In Croa-tian) Pap, N., 2015. The suffering of the Ruthenians in the 1991/92 Homeland War. Vuko-var. (In Croatian) Perić Kaselj, M., Škiljan, F. and Vukić, A., 2015. Event and ethnic situation: changes in the identity of national minority communities in the Republic of Croatia. Studia ethnologica Croatica, 27 (1), s.7–36. Avialable at: https: //dx.doi.org10.17721/2524-048X.2018.11.8-27 [Accessed 1 august 2021] (In Croatian) Radoš, I. and Šangut, Z., 2013. We defended the homeland: members of national minorities in the defense of Croatia. Zagreb: Udruga pravnika “Vukovar 1991”. (In Croa-tian) Simunovič, J., 1995. Rusyns and Ukrainians in the Republic of Croatia – immigration and the situation before 1991]. In: S. Burda, ed. Rusyns and Ukrainians in the Republic of Croatia (1991–1995). Zagreb, pp.25–29. (In Croatian) Szekely, A. B., 1996. Hungarian Minority in Croatia and Slovenia. Nationalities Pa-pers, 24 (3), pp.483–489. Takać, G., 1991. Miklushevtsi's military chronology (1). New opinion, 92/93, p.11. (In Ruthenian) Takać, G., 1992a. Miklushevtsi's military chronology (2). New opinion, 92/93, pp.20–23. (In Ruthenian) Takać, G., 1992b. Miklushevtsi's military chronology (3). New opinion, 92/93, pp.9–12. (In Ruthenian) Takać, G., 1992c. Miklushevtsi's military chronology (4). New opinion, 92/93, pp.5–9. (In Ruthenian) Takać, G., 1992d. Petrovtsi fell among the last (1). New opinion, 92/93, pp.24–27. (In Ruthenian) Takać, G., 1992e. Petrovtsi fell among the last (2). New opinion, 92/93, pp.13–18. (In Ruthenian) Takać, G., 1992f. Petrovtsi fell among the last (3). New opinion, 92/93, pp.10–13. (In Ruthenian) Tatalović, S., 1997. Minority Peoples and Minorities. Zagreb. (In Croatian) Varga, B., 2016. Tragedy of Ukrainians and Ruthenians from Vukovar. [online] Avialable at: http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/tragedija-ukrajinaca-i-rusina-iz-vukovara [Accessed 10 may 2021] (in Croatian) Wertheimer-Baletić, A., 1993. One and a half centuries in the numerical development of the population of Vukovar and the Vukovar region. Social research, 4–5 / God. 2, Br. 2–3, pp.455–478. (In Croatian) Zivić, D., 2006. Demographic framework and losses during the Homeland War and postwar period. In: Z., Radelić, ed. The creation of the Croatian state and the Homeland War, pp.420–483. (In Croatian)

Since the middle of the 19th century, Croatian and Serbian national ideas have been systematically and purposefully imposed on Bosnian Orthodox and Catholics in Bosnia. In this way, the Serb and Croat nations are formed on a religious basis in Bosnia. "Serbs" and "Croats" as national-political determinants are introduced into Bosnia from Serbia and Croatia. Their goal is to nationalize the Catholic population in the Croatian, and the Orthodox in the Serbian national sense. In the Austro-Hungarian period, activities in the field of strengthening national identities were also noticeable in the field of culture. Then there is a more massive organization of the population through various forms of cultural, educational, sports, economic and other societies. These associations, formally non-governmental and non-political, operated politically, with the task of executing national movements and strengthening the national consciousness of Orthodox and Catholics. In this way, a religious and ethnic mosaic was formed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the mentioned period, which created a kind of forms of national movements. This was especially pronounced among the Orthodox population, which in symbiosis and cooperation of cultural, educational, business associations, and church communities, achieved significant progress and results in terms of national awareness and strengthening national and cultural identity. The goal of founding Serbian singing societies is to nurture and strengthen the Serbian national consciousness through nurturing the church song, through books (enlightenment), song and presentation of Serbian theatrical, and especially historical contents. In this way, the singing societies were the bearers of the national and educational-cultural revival of the Orthodox population. The press played a significant role in political action and the spread of national ideas and aspirations. Namely, the press was the most suitable form in terms of spreading ideas and strengthening the national-religious identity, primarily among the Orthodox, but also the rest of the population. Therefore, the occupation authorities strictly controlled and approved the establishment of printing houses with strict checks. Nevertheless, this was not an obstacle for certain newspapers to emphasize their political views and commitments through columns, which is why some were banned, as is the case with the Tuzla newspaper, called "Serbian Movement", which was banned in 1914. Theaters in this period were also very suitable for action on the national-political level. The primary goal of the theater's activities was not cultural uplifting, but agitation in order to develop national consciousness, primarily among the Orthodox population, and in that sense of action against the occupying authorities, but also Bosnia and Herzegovina. Traveling theaters primarily gave performances of historical themes, with the aim of igniting national consciousness, among the Orthodox. Therefore, this paper aims to point out the reflections, primarily of Serbian national-political aspirations in the field of culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with reference to Tuzla, in the Austro-Hungarian period.

After the Second World War, Serbo-Croatian was formally declared on the basis of the so-called Novi Sad Agreement (1954). Its demise is connected to the demise of the Yu-goslav Federation (1992). The sociological, historical, political and ideological rea-sons of the rejection of this glossonym (and with it the rejection of the common lan-guage) were clearly the decisive factor, but they were not always the same. The Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins had specific reasons for this. These reasons can be revealed, inter alia, by analyzing a number of declarative, proclaiming, explanatory, defending, shorter or longer texts on the language generated by all the above-mentioned national communities which used Serbo-Croatian as their first (mother) tongue after 1990. The most recent Declaration on the Common Language (2017) is unique in this sense.

The prominent Serbian and Yugoslav composer Petar Konjovic (1883-1970) wrote five operas between 1900 and 1960. Konjovic?s operatic opus represents his homeland and his spiritual spectrum: in the first place, indelible memories of his childhood and youth focused on the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, in particular its heroic repertoire of Serbian literature. Consequently, three out of five of Konjovic?s music dramas are derived from Serbian epic and theatre plays. In addition to Ivo Vojnovic?s Death of the Jugovic Mother, these are Dragutin Ilic?s Wedding ofMilos Obilic and Laza Kostic?s Maksim Crnojevic. Therefore three of Konjovic?s operas can be conditionally brought together as being in many ways related, not only by their content but also by music and the scope of time they were created: The Fairy?s Veil (based on Wedding of Milos Obilic)during World War I, The Fatherland (based on Death of the Jugovic Mother)during World War II, and between them The Prince of Zeta (based on Maksim Crnojevic). The last of them, subtitled ?A sacred festival drama? (following with its subtitle the idea of Wagner?s Parsifal) had its gala performance in Belgrade National Theatre on 19 October 1983. The structure of the musical composition was inspired by the ?Kosovo mystery play? by Vojnovic (1857-1929), an outstanding dramatist from Dubrovnik. In this case, the playwright was a narrator of the historical-legendary past of the Serbs. Drawing on Serbian national epic poetry which deals with the downfall of the Serbian medieval empire caused by the Turkish invasion, Vojnovic constructed his play on the basis of the central poem of the epic cycle about Kosovo, The Death of the Jugovic Mother. Both the epic and Vojnovic?s play present the tragedy of Serbian people in the figure of the Mother. She dies with a broken heart after the loss of her heroic husband, Jug-Bogdan, and her nine sons, the Jugovici, in the decisive battle against the Turks in the Kosovo field in 1389. Vojnovic?s play was performed in Belgrade and Zagreb in 1906 and 1907 respectively, as well as in Trieste (1911) and Prague (1926); and several Serbian and Croatian composers wrote incidental music for it. Slovenian composer Mirko Polic was also inspired by it and his work was performed in Ljubljana in 1947, while Konjovic?s ?festival drama? finished in 1960 was staged much later. Its premiere in 1983 was scrupulously prepared by the father-son duo, Dusan Miladinovic (conductor) and Dejan Miladinovic (director), who paid special attention to the visual aspect of the performance. The director, together with the scenographer Aleksandar Zlatovic created for The Fatherland a semi-permanent set of symbolical characters, with an enormous raven, made of jute, replacing the backdrop. The costume designer was influenced by medieval frescoes from Serbian monasteries in Kosovo. The director himself conceived a ?mute? and motionless appearance of figures of Serbian warriors in ?tableaux vivants? by placing them in attitudes of combat on the edge of the revolving stage during the curtain music between the acts. What the composer Konjovic aimed for with his last music drama was to eternalize in music the beautiful Serbian epic, depicting the tragic history of his people and thus reminding Serbs of their roots. In this sense The Fatherland was Konjovic?s Ninth Symphony and his oath of Kosovo.

In 1496, Pavao Paladinić (Paolo Paladini, Paulus Paladinus, c. 1465 – c. 1513), a humanist from Hvar, composed his longest preserved text, The Oration of Pavao Paladinić of Hvar delivered in Taranto, in praise of the divine Frederick, Prince of Altamura, Illustrious Admiral of the Kingdom of Sicily and Governor-General. The text survives in a codex held today in Valencia (Universitat de València, Biblioteca Històrica, MS 132). The manuscript was a gift for Frederick of Aragon (1451–1501), the second son of the king of Naples, Ferdinand I (Ferrante). Frederick himself became king of Naples in October 1496. The paper introduces both Paladinić and Frederick, outlines the rhetorical features of Paladinić’s panegyric, and evaluates two modern editions of the Latin text (VALERIO 2001, GRACIOTTI 2005). The panegyric is provided in Latin and Croatian translation. Frederick of Aragon was the last king of Naples from the House of Aragon, ruling briefly in 1496–1501, after French King Charles VIII seized Naples in February 1495 and claimed the kingdom’s crown. Frederick spent much time abroad and refused to take part in the revolt of the barons, remaining loyal to his father, brother, and nephew. As king, he was forced to abdicate when confronted with the treaty of Granada in 1500. He had a keen interest in the arts and literature; in 1476 Lorenzo de’ Medici presented him with the gift of the Libro di Ragona, a collection of 500 poems by Dante, Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, Pulci, and Boiardo. In the preface Frederick is compared to Peisistratos of Athens, who organised the transcription of Homer’s poems. Frederick’s court at Naples included a number of Petrarchist poets. The Paladinić family came to the Adriatic island of Hvar at around 1430 from Lecce, which in 1463 became directly subject to the Aragonese Kingdom of Naples. In Hvar the Paladinići became one of the richest families. Nikola Paladinić (born ca. 1419), Pavao’s father, served as the sopracomito of the Hvar galley in the Venetian navy several times between 1471 and 1497. In 1475 he was awarded the Order of Saint Mark. He had three sons: Pavao, Toma (killed in 1514 during the Hvar Rebellion) and Frano. Pavao accompanied his father in military expeditions, taking part in the capture of Monopoli in 1495 and in the battle at the Bocca d’Arno in 1497. In 1510, he composed a report (in Italian) on the crucifix from Hvar that perspired blood. Pavao Paladinić was in contact with the Dalmatian and Italian humanist poets Ilija Crijević, Tideo Acciarini, Frano Božićević Natalis, Pietro Contarini and Cassandra Fedele. The little known humanist Joannes Perlotus wrote De Nicolai Palladini Pharii equitis aurati Paulique eius filii militia ac memorabilibus gestis historiola per Joannem Perlotum edita, a brief celebration of the military achievements of Nikola and Pavao in 1475–1497 (preserved today as a manuscript in the National and University Library of Split); Nikola and Pavao were praised briefly in the Latin oration by Vinko Pribojević, De origine successibusque Slavorum (delivered in Hvar in 1525, printed in Venice in 1532). Pavao Paladinić praised Frederick of Aragon during the siege of Tarento, undertaken by joint forces of Naples and Venice, with a clear political goal: Frederick had to be persuaded to spare the city of Taranto, whose citizens were eager to surrender to Venice (and even to the Ottomans) to avoid massacre and destruction by the Aragonese army. For this reason, Paladinić insisted on the humanitas of the Aragonese prince. Paladinić’s panegyric follows the chronology of Frederick’s life, but mentions important events of that life only in very vague terms. The main themes of the panegyric are Frederick’s activities at home and abroad; there are remarks on the dignity of the human soul, on the best form of governance, on the island of Hvar and the Paladinić family, on his travels, and on the Necessity which rules human life. Paladinić cited or mentioned a number of names from Greek and Roman Antiquity (Tibullus, Xenocrates, Porphyry of Tyre, Plotinus, Augustine, Cicero, Strabo, Polybius, Aristotle, Apuleius and Hermes Trismegistus, Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Pythagoras, Vergil); while VALERIO 2001 identified most of Paladinić’s sources, I have been able to prove that Paladinić used – without naming it – the popular Italian commentary on Petrarch’s Trionfi by Bernardo da Siena (Bernardo Illicino, ca. 1430), first printed in 1475. Of the two modern editions of Paladini’s Latin panegyric, VALERIO 2001 is more reliable philologically, while GRACIOTTI 2005 is better on the Dalmatian context, and edits both Paladini’s prose and poetry from the Valencia codex.

Gender (in)equality between mothers and fathers is observed in their involvement in child-rearing and housework. Despite both international and Croatian national documents promoting gender equality in various segments of society, there is still research showing that mothers are disadvantaged in comparison to fathers. The aim of the research is to establish the pupils' assessment of the involvement of mothers and fathers in child-rearing and housework. The research was conducted by surveying 290 primary school pupils in Osijek-Baranja County in the Republic of Croatia. Research findings have shown that mothers are more involved in child-rearing and housework than fathers. Fathers are more involved in child-rearing and housework in urban areas, whereas mothers are equally involved in child-rearing and housework regardless of whether they live in urban or rural areas. There is also a difference in the involvement of fathers depending on whether they have a daughter or a son; fathers are more involved in problem-solving and the extracurricular activities of sons than daughters.Key words: housework; children; child-rearing; parents; involvement; urban-rural --- Rodna (ne)ravnopravnost majki i očeva uočava se u uključenosti istih u odgoj djece i brigu o kućanskim poslovima. Unatoč međunarodnim i hrvatskim nacionalnim dokumentima koji promiču ravnopravnost spolova u različitim segmentima društva, još uvijek postoje istraživanja koja pokazuju da su majke u neravnopravnom položaju u odnosu na očeve. Cilj je istraživanja utvrditi procjenu učenika o uključenosti majki i očeva u odgoj djeteta i brigu o kućanskim poslovima. Istraživanje je provedeno anketiranjem 290 učenika osnovnih škola Osječko-baranjske županije u Republici Hrvatskoj. Rezultati su istraživanja pokazali da su majke uključenije u odgoj i brigu o kućanskim poslovima u odnosu na očeve. Očevi su više uključeni u odgoj djece i kućanske poslove u urbanim područjima, dok su majke podjednako uključene u odgoj djece i kućanske poslove neovisno žive li u urbanom ili ruralnom području. Pokazala se i razlika u uključenosti očeva ovisno o tome imaju li kćer ili sina, očevi su više uključeni u rješavanje problema i slobodne aktivnosti sinova, nego kćeri.Ključne riječi: briga o kućanstvu; djeca; odgoj; roditelji; uključenost; urbano-ruralno

Introduction: Socialism – from Eternal Reality to Passing DreamThe Year of Revolutions in 1989 presaged the end of the Cold War. For many people, it must have felt like the end of the Twentieth Century, and the 1990s a period of waiting for the Millennium. However, the 1990s was, in fact, a period of profound transformation in the post-Socialist world.In early representations of Socialism’s end, a dominant narrative was that of collapse. Dramatic events, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in Germany enabled representation of the end as an unexpected moment. Senses of unexpectedness rested on erstwhile perceptions of Socialism as eternal.In contrast, the 1990s came to be a decade of revision in which thinking switched from considering Socialism’s persistence to asking, “why it went wrong?” I explore this question in relation to former-Yugoslavia. In brief, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was replaced through the early 1990s by six independent nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo came much later. In the states that were significantly ethnically mixed, the break-up was accompanied by violence. Bosnia in the 1990s will be remembered for an important contribution to the lexicon of ideas – ethnic cleansing.Revisionist historicising of the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s was led by the scholarly community. By and large, it discredited the Ancient Ethnic Hatreds (AEH) thesis commonly held by nationalists, simplistic media commentators and many Western politicians. The AEH thesis held that Socialism’s end was a consequence of the up-swelling of primordial (natural) ethnic tensions. Conversely, the scholarly community tended to view Socialism’s failure as an outcome of systemic economic and political deficiencies in the SFRY, and that these deficiencies were also, in fact the root cause of those ethnic tensions. And, it was argued that had such deficiencies been addressed earlier Socialism may have survived and fulfilled its promise of eternity (Verdery).A third significant perspective which emerged through the 1990s was that the collapse of Socialism was an outcome of the up-swelling of, if not primordial ethnic tensions then, at least repressed historical memories of ethnic tensions, especially of the internecine violence engendered locally by Nazi and Italian Fascist forces in WWII. This perspective was particularly en vogue within the unusually rich arts scene in former-Yugoslavia. Its leading exponent was Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach.In this article, I consider Laibach’s career and methods. For background the article draws substantially on Alexei Monroe’s excellent biography of Laibach, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005). However, as I indicate below, my interpretation diverges very significantly from Monroe’s. Laibach’s most significant body of work is the cover versions of Western pop songs it recorded in the middle part of its career. Using a technique that has been labelled retroquotation (Monroe), it subtly transforms the lyrical content, and radically transforms the musical arrangement of pop songs, thereby rendering them what might be described as martial anthems. The clearest illustration of the process is Laibach’s version of Opus’s one hit wonder “Live is Life”, which is retitled as “Life is Life” (Laibach 1987).Conventional scholarly interpretations of Laibach’s method (including Monroe’s) present it as entailing the uncovering of repressed forms of individual and collective totalitarian consciousness. I outline these ideas, but supplement them with an alternative interpretation. I argue that in the cover version stage of its career, Laibach switched its attention from seeking to uncover repressed totalitarianism towards uncovering repressed memories of ethnic tension, especially from WWII. Furthermore, I argue that its creative medium of Western pop music is especially important in this regard. On the bases of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bosnia (University of Melbourne Human Ethics project 1544213.1), and of a reading of SFRY’s geopolitical history, I demonstrate that for many people, Western popular cultural forms came to represent the quintessence of what it was to be Yugoslav. In this context, Laibach’s retroquotation of Western pop music is akin to a broader cultural practice in the post-SFRY era in which symbols of the West were iconoclastically transformed. Such transformation served to reveal a public secret (Taussig) of repressed historic ethnic enmity within the very heart of things that were regarded as quintessentially and pan-ethnically Yugoslav. And, in so doing, this delegitimised memory of SFRY ever having been a properly functioning entity. In this way, Laibach contributed significantly to a broader process in which perceptions of Socialist Yugoslavia came to be rendered less as a reality with the potential for eternity than a passing dream.What Is Laibach and What Does It Do?Originally of the industrial rock genre, Laibach has evolved through numerous other genres including orchestral rock, choral rock and techno. It is not, however, a rock group in any conventional sense. Laibach is the musical section of a tripartite unit named Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) which also encompasses the fine arts collective Irwin and a variety of theatre groups.Laibach was the name by which the Slovenian capital Ljubljana was known under the Austrian Habsburg Empire and then Nazi occupation in WWII. The choice of name hints at a central purpose of Laibach and NSK in general, to explore the relationship between art and ideology, especially under conditions of totalitarianism. In what follows, I describe how Laibach go about doing this.Laibach’s central method is eclecticism, by which symbols of the various ideological regimes that are its and the NSK’s subject matter are intentionally juxtaposed. Eclecticism of this kind was characteristic of the postmodern aesthetics typical of the 1990s. Furthermore, and counterintuitively perhaps, postmodernism was as much a condition of the Socialist East as it was the Capitalist West. As Mikhail N. Epstein argues, “Totalitarianism itself may be viewed as a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism” (102). However, Western and Eastern postmodernisms were fundamentally different. In particular, while the former was largely playful, ironicising and depoliticised, the latter, which Laibach and NSK may be regarded as being illustrative of, involved placing in opposition to one another competing and antithetical aesthetic, political and social regimes, “without the contradictions being fully resolved” (Monroe 54).The performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work fulfils three principal functions. It works to (1) reveal hidden underlying connections between competing ideological systems, and between art and power more generally. This is evident in Life is Life. The video combines symbols of Slovenian romantic nationalism (stags and majestic rural landscapes) with Nazism and militarism (uniforms, bodily postures and a martial musical arrangement). Furthermore, it presents images of the graves of victims of internecine violence in WWII. The video is a reminder to Slovenian viewers of a discomforting public secret within their nation’s history. While Germany is commonly viewed as a principal oppressor of Slovenian nationalism, the rural peasantry, who are represented as embodying Slovenian nationalism most, were also the most willing collaborators in imperialist processes of Germanicisation. The second purpose of the performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work is to (2) engender senses of the alienation, especially as experienced by the subjects of totalitarian regimes. Laibach’s approach in this regard is quite different to that of punk, whose concern with alienation - symbolised by safety pins and chains - was largely celebratory of the alienated condition. Rather, Laibach took a lead from seminal industrial rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle (see, for example, Walls of Sound (Throbbing Gristle 2004)), whose sound one fan accurately describes as akin to, “the creation of the universe by an angry titan/God and a machine apocalypse all rolled into one” (rateyourmusic.com). Certainly, Laibach’s shows can be uncomfortable experiences too, involving not only clashing symbols and images, but also the dissonant sounds of, for example, martial music, feedback, recordings of the political speeches of totalitarian leaders and barking dogs, all played at eardrum-breaking high volumes. The purpose of this is to provide, as Laibach state: “a ritualized demonstration of political force” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 44). In short, more than simply celebrating the experience of totalitarian alienation, Laibach’s intention is to reproduce that very alienation.More than performatively representing tyranny, and thereby senses of totalitarian alienation, Laibach and NSK set out to embody it themselves. In particular, and contra the forms of liberal humanism that were hegemonic at the peak of their career in the 1990s, their organisation was developed as a model of totalitarian collectivism in which the individual is always subjugated. This is illustrated in the Onanigram (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst), which, mimicking the complexities of the SFRY in its most totalitarian dispensation, maps out in labyrinthine detail the institutional structure of NSK. Behaviour is governed by a Constitution that states explicitly that NSK is a group in which, “each individual is subordinated to the whole” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 273). Lest this collectivism be misconceived as little more than a show, the case of Tomaž Hostnik is instructive. The original lead singer of Laibach, Hostnik committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack, a key symbol of Slovenian nationalism. Initially, rather than mourning his loss, the other members of Laibach posthumously disenfranchised him (“threw him out of the band”), presumably for his act of individual will that was collectively unsanctioned.Laibach and the NSK’s collectivism also have spiritual overtones. The Onanigram presents an Immanent Consistent Spirit, a kind of geist that holds the collective together. NSK claim: “Only God can subdue LAIBACH. People and things never can” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 289). Furthermore, such rhetorical bombast was matched in aspiration. Most famously, in one of the first instances of a micro-nation, NSK went on to establish itself as a global and virtual non-territorial state, replete with a recruitment drive, passports and anthem, written and performed by Laibach of course. Laibach’s CareerLaibach’s career can be divided into three overlapping parts. The first is its career as a political provocateur, beginning from the inception of the band in 1980 and continuing through to the present. The band’s performances have touched the raw nerves of several political actors. As suggested above, Laibach offended Slovenian nationalists. The band offended the SFRY, especially when in its stage backdrop it juxtaposed images of a penis with Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”, founding President of the SFRY. Above all, it offended libertarians who viewed the band’s exploitation of totalitarian aesthetics as a route to evoking repressed totalitarian energies in its audiences.In a sense the libertarians were correct, for Laibach were quite explicit in representing a third function of their performance of unresolved contradictions as being to (3) evoke repressed totalitarian energies. However, as Žižek demonstrates in his essay “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists”, Laibach’s intent in this regard is counter-totalitarian. Laibach engage in what amounts to a “psychoanalytic cure” for totalitarianism, which consists of four envisaged stages. The consumers of Laibach’s works and performances go through a process of over-identification with totalitarianism, leading through the experience of alienation to, in turn, disidentification and an eventual overcoming of that totalitarian alienation. The Žižekian interpretation of the four stages has, however been subjected to critique, particularly by Deleuzian scholars, and especially for its psychoanalytic emphasis on the transformation of individual (un)consciousness (i.e. the cerebral rather than bodily). Instead, such scholars prefer a schizoanalytic interpretation which presents the cure as, respectively collective (Monroe 45-50) and somatic (Goddard). Laibach’s works and pronouncements display, often awareness of such abstract theoretical ideas. However, they also display attentiveness to the concrete realities of socio-political context. This was reflected especially in the 1990s, when its focus seemed to shift from the matter of totalitarianism to the overriding issue of the day in Laibach’s homeland – ethnic conflict. For example, echoing the discourse of Truth and Reconciliation emanating from post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Laibach argued that its work is “based on the premise that traumas affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts” (NSK Padiglione).In the early 1990s era of post-socialist violent ethnic nationalism, statements such as this rendered Laibach a darling of anti-nationalism, both within civil society and in what came to be known pejoratively as the Yugonostagic, i.e. pro-SFRY left. Its darling status was cemented further by actions such as performing a concert to celebrate the end of the Bosnian war in 1996, and because its ideological mask began to slip. Most famously, when asked by a music journalist the standard question of what the band’s main influences were, rather than citing other musicians Laibach stated: “Tito, Tito and Tito.” Herein lies the third phase of Laibach’s career, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, which has been marked by critical recognition and mainstream acceptance, and in contrasting domains. Notably, in 2012 Laibach was invited to perform at the Tate Modern in London. Then, entering the belly of what is arguably the most totalitarian of totalitarian beasts in 2015, it became the first rock band to perform live in North Korea.The middle part in Laibach’s career was between 1987 and 1996. This was when its work consisted mostly of covers of mainstream Western pop songs by, amongst others Opus, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and, in The Final Countdown (1986), Swedish ‘big hair’ rockers. It also covered entire albums, including a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. No doubt mindful of John Lennon’s claim that his band was more popular than the Messiah himself, Laibach covered the Beatles’ final album Let It Be (1970). Highlighting the perilous hidden connections between apparently benign and fascistic forms of sedentarism, lead singer Milan Fras’ snarling delivery of the refrain “Get Back to where you once belong” renders the hit single from that album less a story of homecoming than a sinister warning to immigrants and ethnic others who are out of place.This career middle stage invoked critique. However, commonplace suggestions that Laibach could be characterised as embodying Retromania, a derivative musical trend typical of the 1990s that has been lambasted for its de-politicisation and a musical conservatism enabled by new sampling technologies that afforded a forensic documentary precision that prohibits creative distortion (Reynolds), are misplaced. Several scholars highlight Laibach’s ceaseless attention to musical creativity in the pursuit of political subversiveness. For example, for Monroe, the cover version was a means for Laibach to continue its exploration of the connections between art and ideology, of illuminating the connections between competing ideological systems and of evoking repressed totalitarian energies, only now within Western forms of entertainment in which ideological power structures are less visible than in overt totalitarian propaganda. However, what often seems to escape intellectualist interpretations presented by scholars such as Žižek, Goddard and (albeit to a lesser extent) Monroe is the importance of the concrete specificities of the context that Laibach worked in in the 1990s – i.e. homeland ethno-nationalist politics – and, especially, their medium – i.e. Western pop music.The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Western Popular Culture in Former YugoslaviaThe Laibach covers were merely one of many celebrations of Western popular culture that emerged in pre- and post-socialist Yugoslavia. The most curious of these was the building of statues of icons of screen and stage. These include statues of Tarzan, Bob Marley, Rocky Balboa and, most famously, martial arts cinema legend Bruce Lee in the Bosnian city of Mostar.The pop monuments were often erected as symbols of peace in contexts of ethnic-national violence. Each was an ethnic hybrid. With the exception of original Tarzan Johnny Weismuller — an ethnic-German American immigrant from Serbia — none was remotely connected to the competing ethnic-national groups. Thus, it was surprising when these pop monuments became targets for iconoclasm. This was especially surprising because, in contrast, both the new ethnic-national monuments that were built and the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments that remained in all their concrete and steel obduracy in and through the 1990s were left largely untouched.The work of Simon Harrison may give us some insight into this curious situation. Harrison questions the commonplace assumption that the strength of enmity between ethnic groups is related to their cultural dissimilarity — in short, the bigger the difference the bigger the biffo. By that logic, the new ethnic-national monuments erected in the post-SFRY era ought to have been vandalised. Conversely, however, Harrison argues that enmity may be more an outcome of similarity, at least when that similarity is torn asunder by other kinds of division. This is so because ownership of previously shared and precious symbols of identity appears to be seen as subjected to appropriation by ones’ erstwhile comrades who are newly othered in such moments.This is, indeed, exactly what happened in post-socialist former-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs were rendered now as ethnic-nationals: Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs in the case of Bosnia. In the process, the erection of obviously non-ethnic-national monuments by, now inevitably ethnic-national subjects was perceived widely as appropriation – “the Croats [the monument in Mostar was sculpted by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić] are stealing our Bruce Lee,” as one of my Bosnian-Serb informants exclaimed angrily.However, this begs the question: Why would symbols of Western popular culture evoke the kinds of emotions that result in iconoclasm more so than other ethnically non-reducible ones such as those of the Partisans that are celebrated in the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments? The answer lies in the geopolitical history of the SFRY. The Yugoslav-Soviet Union split in 1956 forced the SFRY to develop ever-stronger ties with the West. The effects of this became quotidian, especially as people travelled more or less freely across international borders and consumed the products of Western Capitalism. Many of the things they consumed became deeply meaningful. Notably, barely anybody above a certain age does not reminisce fondly about the moment when participation in martial arts became a nationwide craze following the success of Bruce Lee’s films in the golden (1970s-80s) years of Western-bankrolled Yugoslav prosperity.Likewise, almost everyone above a certain age recalls the balmy summer of 1985, whose happy zeitgeist seemed to be summed up perfectly by Austrian band Opus’s song “Live is Life” (1985). This tune became popular in Yugoslavia due to its apparently feelgood message about the joys of attending live rock performances. In a sense, these moments and the consumption of things “Western” in general came to symbolise everything that was good about Yugoslavia and, indeed to define what it was to be Yugoslavs, especially in comparison to their isolated and materially deprived socialist comrades in the Warsaw Pact countries.However, iconoclastic acts are more than mere emotional responses to offensive instances of cultural appropriation. As Michael Taussig describes, iconoclasm reveals the public secrets that the monuments it targets conceal. SFRY’s great public secret, known especially to those people old enough to have experienced the inter-ethnic violence of WWII, was ethnic division and the state’s deceit of the historic normalcy of pan-Yugoslav identification. The secret was maintained by a formal state policy of forgetting. For example, the wording on monuments in sites of inter-ethnic violence in WWII is commonly of the variety: “here lie the victims in Yugoslavia’s struggle against imperialist forces and their internal quislings.” Said quislings were, of course, actually Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (i.e. fellow Yugoslavs), but those ethnic nomenclatures were almost never used.In contrast, in a context where Western popular cultural forms came to define the very essence of what it was to be Yugoslav, the iconoclasm of Western pop monuments, and the retroquotation of Western pop songs revealed the repressed deceit and the public secret of the reality of inter-ethnic tension at the heart of that which was regarded as quintessentially Yugoslav. In this way, the memory of Yugoslavia ever having been a properly functioning entity was delegitimised. Consequently, Laibach and their kind served to render the apparent reality of the Yugoslav ideal as little more than a dream. ReferencesEpstein, Mikhail N. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: U of Massachusettes P, 1995.Goddard, Michael. “We Are Time: Laibach/NSK, Retro-Avant-Gardism and Machinic Repetition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 45-53.Harrison, Simon. “Identity as a Scarce Resource.” Social Anthropology 7 (1999): 239–251.Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.NSK. Neue Slowenische Kunst. Ljubljana: NSK, 1986.NSK. Padiglione NSK. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1993.rateyourmusic.com. 2018. 3 Sep. 2018 <https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/throbbing-gristle>.Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?” 3 Sep. 2018 <www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php.>

Unlike many European nations, Croatia has historically used folk dance as a form of representation, according to dance historian and ethnographer Stjepan Sremac. Following World War II, the Yugoslav State established several professional ensembles, among which was Lado, the Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs of Croatia, under the direction of Zvonko Ljevakovic. Unlike Igor Moiseyev, and in direct opposition to the Moiseyev aesthetic, Ljevakovic employed many authentic details of dance movements, costume, and vocal and instrumental music in his theatricalized folk dance choreographies. Many of the people in Eastern Europe, in which nearly every nation had a professional folk dance ensemble, have turned away from the state-sponsored companies in favor of newer forms of cultural expression, however Lado’s popularity, due to performance strategies created by the new artistic director, Ivan Ivancan, Jr, has greatly increased.

There are numerous national minorities in Croatia supported by the state in their maintenance of minority languages, cultures and traditions. And many of these minorities with songs, dance and customs cherish their own literature, meaning poetry, prose, and drama written by their members in minority languages or in Croatian. These works are mostly known among members of the minorities, but sometimes it is difficult to find the way to readers of the majority of the population. An example of such a minority literature with a long tradition is literary creation of the Czech, who have been living in today’s Croatia for over two hundred years. Nowadays regularly or occasionally there are about thirty authors who write mostly in Czech, but to come to the readership, some of them have been translating their work into the Croatian language lately or leaving their mother tongue and starting to create in Croatian. Are Croatia’s minority works known and to what extent? What are the possibilities of writers using minority languages to publish their works? Why are minority literary works important, what can they offer to a broader readership and in what way can they enrich Croatian literature? How could they reach the majority population and could they wake up the interest beyond Croatian borders? And what difficulties do minority writers encounter? In the presentation, we will use the example of Czech minority literary works in Croatia to answer these and other issues related to minority literature emerging in Croatia, but remaining unknown to the Croatian public.

Abstract Based upon fieldwork with tambura chordophone bands at Croatian weddings, this chapter examines the musical procession of flags in wedding convoys. Scholars typically see flags’ symbolic roles as more semiotically limited than those of national music, but this assumes both forms’ stability (as symbols for interpretation) and discreteness from other sensory phenomena; these conditions do not hold as banners are lifted from static positions (where onlookers view them in two dimensions) into chaotic scenes obscured by automobiles, flares, and smoke. Tambura songs blasted by car speakers and live musicians similarly merge with horns and screeching tires, contributing to the ritual’s affective power while relinquishing some of their sonic and semiotic primacy. The flag’s procession facilitates an affective non-memorial: a revisiting of past perceptual intensities that, in invoking sounds and visuals from past patriotic moments using traditional music and ceremonial magic, is more about transformation from liminal states than about remembering.

The experiential, emotional reception of a piece of music depends on a number of factors. Considering this complex phenomenon from a subjective aspect, the individual experience of a particular piece of music is influenced by the time and place of listening, as well as by physical and social factors, structural elements of the music, and other qualitative elements. Popular music, due to its distinctive features, which are manifested through a simpler melodic and rhythmic structure, elicits an intense emotional response from the listener even at the first listening. The textual element plays a significant role in this, as it can completely change the affective valence of the piece of music. Based on the musical analysis of nine popular songs from the Homeland War, the most intensive period in Croatian history in social and political terms, the paper discusses all the experiential elements that influenced the emotional reception and the popularity of these songs. The impact of lyrics on the affective dimension of the acceptance of the songs is highlighted, as is the setting in which they were composed and the significance they had for the formation of national identity.