When Telefon became Brzoglas: The Recreation of Language and Identity during the Croatian Ustasha Regime (1941–1945) through Censorship of Fctional Prose

• In Event: Reshaping Memory: Instrumentalization of History and Protest Discourse Narratives

Abstract

The rule of the Croatian Ustasha regime between 1941 and 1945 was characterized by strict authoritarian language politics, linguistic surveillance and censorship. The analysis focuses on a literary work that underwent massive linguistic censorship under the Ustashe, the novel “Giga Barićeva” by Milan Begović. A closer look at the textual history, comparing editions issued before and after the regime came to power, allows one to understand how and to what extent the objectives of Ustasha language policies were realized. These policies aimed most of all at purifying the Croatian language from foreign and especially Serbian elements and thus at rebuilding a Croatian identity, which in the regime’s view had suffered tremendously in the past. Analyzing Begović’s “Giga Barićeva” makes it also possible to verify in how far reestablishing a cleaner earlier stage of Croatian as remembered by the Ustasha regime and their followers, actually, meant the creation of a new Croatian language, one that had never existed before. Unfortunately, the history of Croatian during the Ustasha regime has hardly been investigated so far.

Author

• Elias Moncef Bounatirou, U of Vienna (Austria)