Open AccessShards of broken glass
Author(s) -
Vlad Beronja
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
fluminensia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.113
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 1848-9680
pISSN - 0353-4642
DOI - 10.31820/f.32.1.3
Subject(s) - the holocaust , politics , historiography , history , ideology , narrative , identity (music) , literature , aesthetics , war of independence , art , law , political science , archaeology , military service
This articleexamines Daša Drndić's April in Berlin ( April u Berlinu , 2007), alongsidethe author’s other Holocaust novels, as literary responses to historicalrevisionism and outright denialism of the Holocaust in Croatia, which hademerged into the political and cultural mainstream during the War ofIndependence (1991-1995) and has persisted into the post-war period. Since thehistorical legacy of the Fascist NDH in Croatia has been de-traumatized, it nolonger represents a crisis of historical consciousness, which would entail aconfrontation with the violent past as well as a painful transformation ofnational identity and the political space in which this identity isarticulated. In contrast to de-traumatization, as an ethnocentric strategy thatnormalizes the nation’s fascist crimes, Drndić’s novels stage a shockingconfrontation with the shards of the violent past. Through both theirinnovative graphic layout and interdiscursive textuality—which combineshistoriographical narration with avant-garde fictional and artistic devices,words with image—Drndić’s novels function as literary archives and monuments,and archives as monuments, intendedto disturb, disrupt, and jolt the reader into awareness of traumatic history, layingbare the ideological mechanisms of political control and bringing the bodies ofvictims to our doorstep.