Croatian Interwar Cultural Memory and Disabled War Veterans

Abstract

In the contemporary international scholarly community cultural memory related to the First World War as a research field and subject area is extensively problematized and studied by social sciences and humanities. Based on the available surveyed scholarly production, it is evident that Croatian cultural memory of the First World War is an under-researched subject. This paper therefore presents preliminary findings of conducted qualitative sociological research into the development of the post-First World War cultural memory in Croatia in the interwar period. The research provides an insight into how Croatian disabled war veterans (de)constructed post-war cultural memory inside a newly formed multiethnic state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and to which extent it was connected to national and ethnic. The discourse and discursive practices developed by Croatian disabled war veterans are analyzed in selected newspapers (Nezavisnost, Hrvatski invalid, Ratni invalid, Vojni invalid) published in the period 1920–1924. The article uses post-modernist sociological fallibilistic Foucauldian methodology of discourse analysis and Foucault’s understanding of modernist societies, which is based on the research into how the language appropriates specific discourses developed by certain groups in addition to the prevalent discursive practices. Both methodology and theory are used to explain the findings in the framework of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls ‘culture of defeat’. The research concludes that difficult post-war political, social and economic circumstances profoundly shaped the way in which the collective memory of the First World War was (de)constructed by post-war disabled veterans in Croatia and subsequently induced collective amnesia thus helping to create the culture of forgetting.