The memory of the World War II has an active role in the contemporary Croatian society, and especially of the conflict between Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH) founded by Ustasha movement and anti-fascist fighters led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Often heavily politicised, this memory is transmitted within contested narrative frameworks and often anachronously interpreted through the prism of socialist Yugoslavia and the war of the 1990s, resulting in various multi-layered rearrangements of collective identities that are present in the public discourse.
The paper will deal with two recent cultural events that problematize difficult heritage of Ustasha past in Croatia: docufiction film "The Diary of Diana Budisavljevic" and theatre play "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Despite being very different in their approach, they both tackled already very dense and contested memory discourse and received considerable media attention.
"The Diary of Diana Budisavljevic" is the independent production film by Dana Budisavljevic on the civil action of rescuing Serbian children from deportations and concentration camps established by Ustasha led NDH that introduced racial laws and prosecuted and killed its citizens based on their race, ethnicity (i.e. Serbs, Jews, Roma) and political views. The film is the result of a 10 years long project based on the initiative and enthusiasm of the director and her associates and has gained important awards as well as a considerable interest of professional and wider audience.
"Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Jernej Lorenci, staged in Zagreb Youth Theatre, is a self-reflexive and metatheatrical play that was initiated by the director's idea to stage Hannah Arendt's famous book, but through the collaborative work with actors developed in other direction. Instead of implementing the narrative on the banality of evil in the context of German Nazism, actors and director decided to use it as a starting point for dealing with the local history of Ustasha crimes. While re-staging the scenes from Eichmann's trial, Lanzmann's film "Shoah", and footage of the trial of Andrija Artukovic, an NDH Ustasha minister, the play compares Nazi with Ustasha past. Furthermore, the play also problematizes contemporary consequences of difficult WWII heritage, such as transgenerational transmission of trauma, through actors' references on the relation between the past and their everyday reality.
These two examples are important for two reasons: firstly, they are rare examples of film and theatre play that deal with these issues, because although Croatian public discourse in general and, more specifically, every-day political battles are saturated WWII memory, this is not the case in the field of film and performing arts; and secondly, they confront contested WWII heritage in a direct way. This paper will analyse two different approaches used in the film/on the stage and consider their impact on the re-construction of collective identities in the context of already existing ones that are dominantly present in the public sphere.
