Yugoslavian National Myth and Identity in Veljko Bulajic’s Kozara

• In Event: Interrogating Identity in Eastern European Literature and Film: Myth, Resilience, and the Nation

Abstract

This paper examines one of the best and most well-known works from the acclaimed Yugoslavian director, Veljko Bulajic; a film where he explicitly posits the Serbian people of Kozara, subject to Nazi and Ustashi pogrom, as both the victim (of genocide) and a ritualistic sacrifice made at the altar of nationhood. We aim to substantiate the position that the nation making is built using the vehicle of myth and mythical narrative; that to create the myth, one must create the notion of the sacred, via the sacrificial mechanism. This work explores the idea of the people who are creating the myth, representing themselves as the sacrifice at the altar of nascent nation. In this regard, we explore the dynamics between different peoples and nations participating in the Yugoslavian project. On one end, we have Serbian, Croatian and Muslim partisans – on the other, we have Serbian (Chetniks), Croatian (Ustashi) and Muslim (also Ustashi) Nazi collaborators presented as the enemy of both the people and the Yugoslavian project. We seek to explore the peculiar situation where a clear-cut dichotomy of “Us versus Them”, often necessary in nationalistic myth making and nationalistic narratives in general, is not possible here, or is considerably more complicated, as members of all the peoples involved participate both as collaborator and as freedom fighters. We aim to study the creation of national myth in this peculiar context, where the lines of alliances and national belonging are, at best, blurred and in the grey.

Author

• Boris Djordje Petrovic, U Paris-Sorbonne- Paris 4 (France)