engleski

Honour, Revenge, Hate and Atrocities: The Croatian Perspective 1914-1918

Since the late 1970s, the historical changes concerning battlefield experience, including various types of behaviour, attitudes and motivation, have been treated by military historians like John Keegan and Richard Holmes. Converging with a social and cultural history approach promoted by e. g. István Deák and Peter Burke, the so-called “view from below” – largely based on autobiographic writings, correspondence and popular press – has also been applied by First World War researchers such as Eric J. Leed, Wolfram Wette, Leonard V. Smith, Oto Luthar and Frédéric Rousseau. Their conclusions tell us of suffering, short-term psychological shock, and long-term cultural trauma inflicted on the mostly conscripted combatants by the hitherto mostly unknown advances of military technology and social engineering, but also of the strong dedication towards the war goals of one’s nation, resulting in a strong will to persevere, which warfare sociologist Siniša Malešević situates within broader modernizational trends of “cumulative organisation of coercion” and “centrifugal ideologization”. Within that scope, and based on autobiographies, official military manuals, regimental histories and a selection of propaganda literature of widely defined Croatian origin, the author strives to reconstruct the experience of common soldiers, NCOs and officers up to the rank of major (i.e. a partially representative sample of “ordinary people”) concerning the gradually redefined notions of honour, revenge, hate and atrocities. Although incomplete, the sources suggest a conclusion that the 1914–1918 Croatian perspective in that field is similar to other European perspectives – surely, neither of them should be misunderstood as a uniform whole – but also characterized by interesting differences, arguably being a result of various political, social and cultural backgrounds.

First World War; Austria-Hungary; Croatia; battlefield experience; trauma; autobiography; modernization

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