Between Terror and Self-Transformation: Subjectivity, Petition Writing and Survival under Ustasha...

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RORY YEOMANS

BETWEEN TERROR AND SELF-TRANSFORMATION: PETITION WRITING, SUBJECTIVITY AND SURVIVAL UNDER USTASHA RULE, 1941–1942

The everyday lives of citizens in the early months of the Independent State of Croa-tia were defined by petition writing more than by any other activity. It was through petitions to state ministries, agencies and local Ustasha authorities that ordinary people sought to gain social advancement, achieve justice and negotiate their day-to-day existences. Cumulatively, they provided officials with a picture—however fragmentary—of public opinion in the state. By contrast, the Serbian and Jewish communities, whom the Ustasha state had targeted for destruction, used peti-tions as a means of mediating Ustasha terror. Petitions were never just a mode of communication between the state and citizens; they were imbued with subjective meaning. For those included in the envisaged national community, petition writ-ing provided an opportunity to demonstrate that they had been inculcated with the state’s new ideological and cultural orthodoxies, transforming themselves from Croatian citizens into Ustasha subjects; for those “undesired elements” outside the national community, petition writing constituted nothing less than a search for salvation. Yet, paradoxically, it was the state’s “community aliens” who had to dem-onstrate in their writing the greatest evidence of transformation. In reproducing the language of the state and separating their transformed consciousnesses from other members of their community, they hoped to gain admittance to the national community and avoid terror. The cadre of ambitious young experts and students who poured into state ministries in the spring and summer of 1941 engaged with state ministries and agencies in a very different way, aiming to be active agents in the remaking of society. Nonetheless, they also aimed to provide evidence of their transformation into Ustasha subjects imbued with the state’s values.

In her study of ethnic Greeks in inter-war Bulgaria, Theodora Dragostinova has ar-gued that citizens adapted to the homogenising tendencies of nationalism through “strategies of adaptation.” Ordinary people were not “simply objects of state-spon-sored national policies, but were active agents that shaped the national discourse and practice to serve their needs and priorities.” Local people then learnt to “speak na-tional,” using “the national idiom in their encounters with the administrators, hoping to improve their precarious situations within the aggressively nationalizing states.” Since nationality was the exclusive language of social legislation, national identity

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increasingly functioned as an “emergency identity” or a “rhetorical strategy that fa-cilitated individuals’ adjustment to official policies. The utilisation of the national language served as a discourse of entitlement, especially during military conflicts and nationalization campaigns, and the active expression of national loyalty became a strategy for handling the difficult social reality.” National indifference played an im-portant part in this process, Dragostinova contends. Despite attempts to divide the population of Bulgaria by nationality, individuals were often able to speak national precisely because they showed a high degree of indifference to nationality.1

If theories of national indifference emphasise adaptation to a given situation, sub-jectivity seeks to understand how individuals represent themselves, especially in totalitarian states. Rather than interpreting declarations of self-transformation as utilitarian devices for social survival under extreme conditions, it sees them as part of the way in which individuals’ consciousnesses are often transformed in totalitar-ian societies. Subjectivity has become an area of scholarly contestation in recent years, especially from other historians who have challenged its lack of empiricism and its willingness to take the writing of ordinary people at face value. By contrast, advocates of subjectivity have argued that in taking the writing of citizens seriously on its own terms, historians avoid imbuing testimonies, whether in the form of private correspondence or public communication, with strategies, intentions and liberal agendas the authors might never have intended. Debates about subjectivity have been particularly sharp among historians of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, in whose work it has played an increasingly important role. This is perhaps not surprising given the ambitious nature of the totalising experiments these two states embarked on to remake individual consciousness and transform society through programmes of social and racial engineering. With its programmes of terror and social transformation, the Independent State of Croatia, founded by the Ustasha movement in April 1941 under Nazi occupation, arguably has strong similarities with Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.2 Nowhere in the new state was this sym-biosis of social transformation and terror more strikingly pursued than in the State Directorate for Economic Regeneration (Državni ravnateljstvo za gospodarstvu ponovu—DRGP) and Institute for Colonisation (Zavod za kolonizacije – Za-vKol) and the Jewish Section of the Directorate of Ustasha Police (Židovski odsjek Ravnateljstva ustaškog redarstva—ŽORUR). It was in these directorates that the building of a national economy and the transformation of the countryside were mapped out and implemented and from which the removal of a significant part of the state’s Serbian and Jewish populations was co-ordinated.

1 Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 9–14; Dragostinova, “Speaking National: Nationalizing the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1939,” Slavic Review 67, no. 1 (spring 2008): 154–181. On national indifference see also Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

2 The classic works on the history of the Ustasha movement and Independent State of Croatia are Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisne Hrvatske (Zagreb: Liber, 1978); Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i Ustaše (Zagreb: Globus, 1978) and Martin Broszat and Ladislaus Hory, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941–1945 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1964).

When thinking about terror, subjectivity can operate as a form of what Clifford Geertz called “thick description.” If, as Geertz claimed, thick description enabled historians to understand not just the behaviours of historical subjects, but also the context in which those behaviours took place, so that a reconstruction of events was recognisable to the original participants as well as the objective reader, sub-jectivity works in a similar way.3 It allows us to reconstruct the world in which the subjects lived and to better explain their thinking and behaviour. While many studies of subjectivity concentrate on a particular subset of subjects, in the case of the Ustasha terror in the summer of 1941 ideas about self-representation applied to a far broader demographic. In the midst of mass deportations, incarcerations and violence, across the state both victims and beneficiaries of terror were remak-ing themselves, revealing their feelings, emotions and thoughts. Seen from this perspective, a subjective approach can help to illuminate not just individual biog-raphies but also the inner dynamics of state terror. Rather than the binary alterna-tives of history “from above” or “from below,” subjectivity provides a perspective across and through society. While Dragostinova’s theories of “emergency identity” and “speaking national” are applicable to the petitions written by Serbs and Jews to the DRGP and ŽORUR, they aren’t complete explanations since they assume petition writers were driven only by contingency or fear and do not consider the possible meanings behind the words petitioners wrote. Igal Halfin has argued that the historiographical value of subjectivity as applied to Stalinist terror and the ritu-als of confessional Soviet Samokritika is that it allows the individual to speak as an authentic subject without masks: “No longer must we imagine a universal self putting on a range of disguises based on his environment; revolutionary discourse helps the self reflect upon itself, articulate itself and assume its concrete outline.”4 Similarly, we must ask in the context of these petitions, frequently confessional and self-critical in tone, whether it was only deep dread which shaped Serbian and Jewish narratives to state directorates or whether some of them, at least, reflected genuinely-held beliefs. Most importantly, perhaps, in looking not just at what sub-jects wrote but who they were and how they felt, subjectivity can play an important role in restoring the individual to the centre of the story of Ustasha terror.5

3 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.

4 Igal Halfin, Terror in my Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.

5 While there are a number of useful studies of the deportation programme, they tend to focus on political dynamics and utilise “from above” perspectives. See, for example, Filip Škiljan, “Prisilno iseljavanje Srba iz Moslavine 1941. godine,” Historijski zbornik LXV, no. 1 (2012), 149–169; Škiljan, “Organizirano masovno prisilno iseljavanje Srba iz Hrvatske 1941. Godine,” Stanovništvo 2 (2012): 1–34; Marica Karakaš-Obradov, “Migracije srpskog stanovništva na području Nezavisne Države Hrvatske tijekom 1941. godine,” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 40, no. 3 (2011): 801–826. The most comprehensive Croatian-language study of the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia is Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi Liber, 2001). However, while it discusses a number of petitions from Jews to ŽORUR, it does not analyse them in detail and employs a narrative approach which does not engage with subjectivity.

TERROR AND MAKING NEW SUBJECTS IN THE USTASHA STATE

On 15 May 1941, one month after the founding of the state, the administrative commissioner for the Bijeljina region published a list of the chief laws that had been introduced since 10 April. How much notice ordinary people took of these laws, or to what extent they were even aware of them, is debatable. Certainly, the commissioner felt the need to point out that many citizens were not obeying these statutes “because of lack of awareness of them, or for some other reason” and that those who continued to ignore them would find themselves before a court martial.6 Many of these laws were directed at the state’s Serbs and Jews, and the single-mindedness of purpose they displayed in visiting terror on the everyday lives on Serbs, Jews and Gypsies was a defining feature of the state’s legal culture. The capi-tal Zagreb set the tone. On 8 May 1941, Marijan Nikšić, the director of the Ustasha Police, issued an order stating that, within a space of eight days, all Serbs and Jews living in the northern parts of the city had to “resettle”; those who did not comply would be forcibly expelled at their own expense and punished according to exist-ing statutes. In another order, Nikšić stated that Jews and Serbs should only walk the streets between 6am and 9pm and Serbs would only be allowed to leave or enter the city with the permission of the Ustasha Police.7 The ordinances against Jews and Serbs in some other cities were even harsher. In Varaždin, the Ustasha Police banned Jews from visiting taverns, parks and bathing pools, going to pub-lic squares and open markets before 9am and attending public performances; as with Serbs, they were also banned from leaving their homes between 8am and 5pm. In Sarajevo, Serbs were banned from parks, cafes, cinemas and taverns and public bathing.8 Jews and Serbs were also barred from employment in the profes-sions; professional and trade associations within the Chamber of Commerce, such as those representing doctors and lawyers, were required by the Ministry of the Interior to send in lists of members so that Serbs and Jews could be identified and purged, ensuring that the professions were purified of “foreign” influences. At the same time, Jews and Serbs, with few exceptions, were removed from their positions in the state sector en masse. For example, on 12 May 1941, Hrvatski narod trium-phantly announced the sacking of all Jewish and Serbian employees from the postal service in various towns and cities throughout the state, with their name, place of

6 Order from the administrative commissioner for Bijeljina, 14 May 1941, Hrvatski Državni Arhiv, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, Zbirka štampata (hereafter HDA, NDH, ZŠ), 104.36/107.202; “Zakonska odredba za obranu naroda i države,” HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 104.36/99/82.

7 Order from the director of the Ustasha Police in Zagreb, 8 May 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 104.36/104/19 and 1289/41.

8 Order of the Ustasha Police office in Varaždin, 21 June 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 104.36/99/115; “Nove naredbe Židovima u Varaždinu,” Novi list, 27 June 1941; Emily Greble, “When Croatia Needed Serbs: Nationalism and Genocide in Sarajevo, 1941–1942,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 127.

residence and position being published in full. This, the newspaper argued, was not only “in the interests of the state service” but necessary to correct past employment injustices inflicted against Croatian workers.9

The use of mass registrations was a key weapon in the development of Ustasha terror. A legal statute issued by the Ministry of the Interior on 9 June 1941 made it obligatory for Serbs who had settled on the territory of the state after 1900 to register with the local authority and in Zagreb with the Ustasha Police, irrespective of their profession or social status. Any Serb who failed to do this within ten days was to be considered a prisoner of war and would be transferred to a prison camp.10 Ever anxious about the possibility of an uprising among the Serbian and Jewish communities, in early May Marijan Nikšić ordered that all Serbs and Jews in Za-greb hand in their weapons.11 Meanwhile, at the end of April 1941, the Ministry of the Interior under Andrija Artuković introduced a succession of racial laws which defined membership of the Croatian racial community. These racial laws barred Jews from working in the public sector and private companies, employing Aryans, and from any involvement in national political, social, economic and cultural life. They also banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews. On the other hand, all state employees were required to produce certificates proving that their mothers and fathers as well as grandparents were of “Aryan” stock and that they had no non-Aryan forebears.12 A n additional law of 10 June 1941 ordered that Jewish-owned stores had to be marked while the Ustasha Police ordered that Jews aged fourteen or older had to wear a Jewish insignia, which was to be worn both on the left-hand side of the chest and the left upper arm. One of the unusual features of this law was an exceptional clause for Jews who were employed in state service, on active military duty or who had Aryan spouses and children who were baptised before 10 April 1941. To gain an exemption and become an “honorary Aryan” citizen, a Jew-ish citizen had to apply in writing to ŽORUR. However, this clause had no power of deferment, and while successful petitions exempted individuals “from the duty to wear the sign [it] has no bearing on the right to exemption from other orders which are related to racial membership.” In other words, gaining the same rights as Aryan citizens did not protect a Jew from persecution in the future.13

The Law for the Defence of the People and the State, which was introduced barely a week after the state’s foundation, also played a pivotal legislative role in the im-plementation of terror, especially against the Serbian intelligentsia and urban elite. Through the establishment of a series of people’s emergency and extraordinary courts, the law arbitrarily gave the state the right to punish with death anyone

9 See, for example, “Otpust poštanskih službenika,” Hrvatski narod, 12 May 1941. 10 “Naredba o dužnosti prijave Srbijanaca,” 372 Z. P. 1941, Narodne novine, 7 June 1941. 11 Ministry of Interior order, 9 June 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 104.36/99/124; order from the director

of RAVSIGUR, 7 June 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 103.36/144/104; order from the director of Ustasha Police in Zagreb, 16 May 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 104.34/22/104.

12 “Zakonska odredba o rasnoj pripadnosti,” XLV-67 Z., Narodne novine, 30 April 1941. 13 “Naredba o promjeni židovskih preizmena i označivanju Židove i židovskih tvrtka,” Narodne

novine, 4 June 1941.

who had “offended the honour and vital interests of the Croatian people or in any way the existence of the Independent State of Croatia or state powers, by deed or by attempt.”14 Courts were established in all the state’s cities, and most of them were presided over by ideologically-fanatical Ustasha judges, students and activ-ists. Moreover, the court procedure was heavily stacked against defendants, mean-ing there was little chance of a fair trial. If a defendant was found guilty, under the terms of the legislation, the death sentence had to be imposed; there could be no appeal and the sentence had to be carried out by firing squad within three hours. Although initially courts targeted the Serbian economic and social elite, as they were assumed to possess a strong Serbian consciousness, many ordinary Serbs also fell victim in the first few months of the new state. Those tried and found guilty ranged from booksellers accused of distributing defamatory pamphlets about the Ustasha movement in the 1930s and civilians found with weapons in their homes to senior former police chiefs, judges and politicians who were alleged to have been part of the machinery of the oppression of the Croatian people under Yugoslav rule.15 A series of sensational show trials of allegedly corrupt former Yugoslav of-ficials reinforced the idea that these purges and liquidations were part of a wider process of post-revolutionary social justice against national and class enemies.16

Parallel to this legalised terror, student battalions and party militias organised by the Main Ustasha Headquarters (Glavni Ustaški Stan – GUS) in Zagreb and by Ustasha councils in the regions launched a campaign of mass killing in the country-side against both the local Serbian intelligentsia and orthodox priests and Serbian peasants. All physical traces of a Serbian presence on the territory of the new state were being eradicated: churches, cathedrals, monuments, statues and stadiums were destroyed; villages, street names and public spaces with Serbian associations were renamed; and Serbian cultural institutions and societies were closed down and liquidated.17 In the meantime, the Ministry for Education promulgated a series of laws which criminalised any expression of a separate Serbian identity. A law of July 1941, for example, declared that “the title ‘Serbian Orthodox’ is no longer in harmony with the new state order. This legal statute deems it necessary to use the title ‘Greek-Eastern faith’ when referring to them instead.” According to a circular sent by the Ustasha movement’s chief propagandist Mijo Bzik to officials, Serbs were henceforth to be known as “Greek-Easterners,” “Vlachs” and “former Serbs.”

14 “Zakonska odredba za obranu naroda i države,” Narodne Novine, 17 April 1941. 15 See, for example, “Zloglasni Milan Huzjak i drugovi pred izvanrednim narodnim sudom,” Novi

list, 5 August 1941; “Drski srpski pamfletist pred izvanrednih narodnim sudom,” Novi list, 20 June 1941; “Prva osuda prijekog suda za područje bivše Vrbaške banovine,” Novi list, 23 May 1941.

16 See, for example, “Ubojica i pronevjeritelj Đorđe Radivojša odgovara za svoja nedjela pred sudom,” Hrvatska krajina, 26 June 1941.

17 See, for example, “Naredba o promjeni sela i katastarske obćine Srpsko Selište, upravne obćine i kotara Kutina u Moslavačko Selište,” 4334-MUP-1941, Narodne novine, 26 May 1941; “Zakonska odredba o promjeni imena grada Srijemske Mitrovice,” CIII-519-Z. p. – 1941, Narodne novine, 26 June 1941; “Zakonska odredba o preuzimanju imovine ‘srbskih zavoda i ustanova’ u Hrvatskim Karlovcima u vlastništvo Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,” CCCVII-1485-Z. p.– 1941; “Naredba o promjeni imena nekih mjesta u kotaru Gradačac, Derventa, Doboj i Sarajevo,” 795, Narodne novine, 20 September 1941; “Naredba o projjeni imena nekih mjesta na području velke župe Baranja u Osijeku,” 794, Narodne novine, 20 September 1941.

Under no circumstances, he added, should the word “Serb” be used “when dealing with the Vlachs in Croatia.”18 The term “former Serbs” was a particular meaningful phrase. Although it referred to all Serbs living in Croatia, including the peasant masses, it was particularly applied to the educated, economically-prosperous strata of Serbian society which, Ustasha intellectuals believed, would never be willing to relinquish its distinct identity. Only once these “former Serbs” had been removed could the peasant masses be “transformed” into Croatians. With its combination of class and national connotations, the expression was similar to the category of “former people” developed during the Stalinist period to describe those kulaks and village intelligentsia deemed hostile to collectivisation and the proletariat visions of the Soviet state. As a result, they had been deported to settlements in the remote East to ensure collectivisation could be fully implemented.19

Even before the establishment of the DRGP and ZavKol, the state had begun to draft legal statutes targeting the removal of this category of Serbs. On 18 April 1941, a law was issued depriving post-First World War Serbian settlers of their farms without compensation. More than five thousand settlers were expelled be-tween May and June and their land redistributed to impoverished Croatian peas-ants and returning émigrés under the supervision of ZavKol.20 Shortly afterwards, the Office for Economic Renewal (Ured za obnovu privrede, the forerunner of the DRGP) began gathering a register of the assets and property of Jewish and Ser-bian businesses as a prelude to their nationalisation and the removal of Serbian and Jewish workers from the national economy.21 To ensure compliance, the Office for Economic Renewal appointed commissioners to Serbian and Jewish businesses ranging from the smallest tailor’s workshop to the largest factory. Overnight, Jews and Serbs were rendered economically destitute. In a meeting in May 1941 with representatives of the German occupation authorities, Ustasha officials had agreed to accept two hundred thousand “disloyal” Slovenes expelled from Slovenia by the German military authorities in exchange for the deportation to Serbia of the same number of Serbs.22 It reasoned that a programme of mass deportations would en-able the state to remove nationally-conscious educated Serbs while benefitting

18 “Ministarstva odredba o nazivu ‘grcko-istočnje vjere,’” Narodni novine, 19 July 1941; Mijo Bzik, “Okružnica,” HDA, NDH, Ministarstvo pravosudje i bogoštovlje (hereafter MPB), 31.218/I-81–120/119/1941.

19 On the concept of byvshie liudi during the Stalinist terror see Lynne Viola, “The Second Coming: Class Enemies in the Soviet Countryside,1927–1935,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, eds. J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65–98. The most recent study of setlements in the remote East during collectivisation is Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009).

20 “Zakonska odredba o nekretninama t. zv. Dobrovoljaca,” Narodne novine, 18 April 1941. 21 See, for example, “Zakonska odredba o obveznoj prijavi imetak Židova i židovskih poduzeća,” CL-

348-Z. p. 1941, Narodne novine, 5 June 1941; “Zakonska odredba o podržavljenju imetka Židova i židovskih poduzeća,” CCCXXXVI-1699 Z.p.–1941, Narodne novine, 9 October 1941.

22 “Zapisnik sa sjednice njemačko poslanstva u Zagrebu održane 4. Juna 1941 pod vođstvom poslanika Kašea u vezi sa preseljavanjem Slovenaca iz Rajha u Hrvatsku i Srbiju, odnoso Srba iz Hrvatske u Srbiju,” 4 June 1941, HDA, NDH, Zemaljska komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomogača, 49.306/49/3/1.

the state economy. After being renamed the State Directorate for Regeneration in June 1941 and reconstituted as an independent directorate, it was tasked with overseeing this process, dealing with all questions concerning the settlement and emigration of populations and the transfer of property between those settling in Croatia and those emigrating from it. From its central office in Zagreb, it oversaw the establishment of regional DRGP branches, resettlement camps and a dedicated militia.23

While deportations initially concentrated on educated and affluent Serbs, the pro-gramme quickly expanded to encompass a far wider cross section of the commu-nity. The expulsions were often carried out at night, with individuals given thirty minutes’ notice. Victims were allowed to take only fifty kilos of personal property and whatever money and valuables they could carry. In some cases, as in the city of Mostar, the entire Serbian population was expelled at once. In addition to the planned transfers, in some areas regional Ustasha authorities also carried out spon-taneous expulsions of Serbs. By September 1941, when the German occupation authorities ordered a permanent halt to the process, local councils had deported nearly 120,000 of the 170,000 Serbs stipulated in the agreement. While some de-ported Serbs never reached their destination, those that did often arrived in an appalling state, something German military officials complained about.24 Depor-tees were often brutally treated by guards both at railway stations where they were assembled and on train journeys to the camps. Conditions in the resettlement camps were deplorable, often constituting whatever school, sports hall, warehouse or open air facility a DRGP branch could find. With thousands of people, included new-born babies, crowded into small unventilated buildings, with minimal or no food, clean water or milk, it is not surprising that disease spread rapidly. In the worst camps, the unbearable conditions and brutal treatment by the DRGP guards led to uprisings among deportees.25 On the surface, this was of little concern to the local students, businessmen, professionals, clerical workers, postal staff and housewives who applied to sit on committees involved in the confiscation and liq-uidation of Serbian and Jewish businesses, assets and property. On the other hand, local DRGP branches faced more challenges in finding qualified staff. Yet the lack of experienced economists, agronomists, statisticians and field researchers in a state where almost half the population was illiterate meant opportunities for career

23 “Zakonska odredba o osnutku Državnoga ravnateljstva za ponovu,” CLXXI-507-Z. p.– 1941, Narodne novine, 24 June 1941. Strictly speaking, the DRGP was named the State Directorate for Regeneration (Državni ravnateljstvo za ponovu –DRP) between June and July 1941, but here the term DRGP is used for the sake of clarity.

24 The German military authorities became so alarmed by the state of the refugees and the potential for unrest in Serbia that within a few weeks of the deportations beginning they had already ordered a complete cessation. One German officer commented with disdain that the Ustasha militias had treated the Serbs “in such a way that one would not even inflict on the Jews in Germany.” See “Obustavljene preseljavanje pravoslavaca u Srbiju,” 6 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/Srpski odsjek/Opći spisi (hereafter SO/OS) 445.1076/unnumbered.

25 For a detailed though controversial description of the resettlement camps see Alexander Korb, Im Schatten des Weltskrieg: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), 169–245.

advancement for the cohort of young students, social activists and officials who filled this expertise gap. Added to this, regional branches tended to be small, and therefore the quality of staff performance could have a significant impact. Since individual achievement was measured in terms of how efficiently officials could implement deportations, terror and social mobility as well as the utopian promise of social engineering played a mutually reinforcing role.

After the mass killing in the countryside and the violent deportation programme led to an uprising by Serbs against the state, the DRGP played a leading role in au-tumn 1941 in the programme to convert the Serbian masses to Catholicism, which was co-ordinated by its religious section. Forced assimilation, the state’s young in-tellectuals in particular argued, would succeed where terror and mass killing had failed, and in “transforming” the “former Serbs” into Croatians would solve the Ser-bian “problem.”26 Under the leadership of a young Franciscan Dionizije Juričev, the religious section sent zealous young priests into the countryside to convert Serbs in mass baptismal ceremonies guarded over by armed Ustasha militia units.27 Ac-cording to notorious directive B-41 sent to local authorities by Radoslav Glavas, a young seminarian in the Ministry of Religion, peasants and workers should be con-verted to Catholicism, and in so doing they would become Croats and be protected from persecution. The Serbian intelligentsia, priests and educated Serbs which re-mained in Croatia, on the other hand, would be excluded, since, Glavas argued, their Serbian identity was too strong. The clear implication was that they would be liquidated.28 While this programme of forced assimilation, heavily resisted by the movement’s hardliners, resulted in the conversion of an estimated 90,000 Serbs, by the winter of 1941 the rate of conversions had declined drastically. Not least among the reasons for this was that Serbs, even after they had converted to Catholicism, continued to be subject to terror by militias. When it became clear to them that converting would not prevent them from being liquidated, many Serbs simply ig-nored orders to attend baptismal ceremonies. In February 1942, on the advice of the German authorities, Andrija Artuković announced the establishment of an au-tocephalous Croatian Orthodox Church, which all Serbs were encouraged to join. In the face of continuing Ustasha terror and resistance within the Ustasha move-ment, few did so with conviction, no matter how much the state tried to present it a part of a wider package aimed at the reintegration of the Serbian community into mainstream society. Fewer “former Serbs” still embraced their new identity as “Orthodox Croatians,” even when systematic terror against them ceased in autumn

26 See, for example, Jere Jareb, “Grko-istočnjaci u Hrvatskoj,” Ustaška mladež, 30 November 1941, 3; Jure Boroje, “Prodor grčko-istočnjaštvo u Hercegovini,” Plava revija 11, no. 2–3 (November-December 1941): 93–97.

27 Regarding the mass conversion programme see Mark Biondich, “Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Conversions, 1941–1942,” Slavonic and East European Review 85, no. 1 (January 2005): 71–16; Rory Yeomans, “Eradicating ‘Undesired Elements’: National Regeneration and the Ustasha Regime’s Program to Purify the Nation,” in Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1928–1945, eds. Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans (London and Lincoln, NA: Nebraska University Press, 2013), esp. 215–225.

28 Directive from Andrija Radoslav Glavas to regional authorities, 14 July 1941, HDA, NDH, MPB, 42.218/B-41.

1942. In any case, those Serbs who wrote to the DRGP in summer 1941 could not have predicted these future developments. For them as for Jewish subjects, terror stretched out endlessly; those who could not escape or who longed to belong to the Croatian national community aimed to assimilate themselves through demonstra-tions of loyalty, laying bare their inner souls.

VICTIMS, BENEFICIARIES AND USTASHA SUBJECTS

Nadežda Rakić was a twenty-six year old clerical worker living in Donji Vakuf with her husband, new-born baby and teenage brother. Her life was changed irrevocably in April 1941, when the Independent State of Croatia was founded. In fact, within three months she was writing to the DRGP asking for permission to emigrate to Serbia along with baby and brother Tihomir. Nadežda Rakić’s letter was one of many petitions which the directorate received that summer from Serbian citizens who, having been dismissed from employment, were facing not just economic ruin but destitution too. Applying to voluntarily leave the state, even if it meant leav-ing property, belongings and an entire social world behind, offered one avenue of escape for the desperate. This was the situation which faced Rakić and her family who, as she made clear in her petition, were facing catastrophe:

Seeing that I have absolutely no means of survival and so that I, my five-month old child and my brother don’t perish from starvation, I beg you to allow me to resettle from Donji Vakuf in the region of Jajce to Kragujevac in Serbia. I am of the Greek-Eastern religion and was born on 7 April 1915 in Donji Vakuf and am married to the teacher Dušan Rakić from Kragujevac, who worked in Donji Vakuf and is now imprisoned in Germany; I have not received his pay for the past three and a half months. Previously, I was employed at the local branch of the former Banovina administration in Donji Vakuf as a day worker, from which position I was dismissed. This small amount of pay has now been used up and there exists no other option for me other than either to beg or die from starvation. Until now I haven’t sought resettlement because I didn’t know where my husband was but now he has contacted me from German incarceration and so that I can somehow survive until his return, I must move to his mother’s in Kragujevac. I plan to leave with my five-month old baby who was born on 11 February 1941 as well as my brother Tihomir Kalaba who was born on 18 July 1923 in Donji Vakuf and is also of the Greek-Eastern faith. He would remain [in Serbia] permanently. In terms of possessions I would like to take along with me: three large suitcases and two small suitcases which would be for the most essential possessions (clothes and undergarments), two quilts, two pillows and two mattresses. I would also like to bring along as

much money as I am permitted. I beg the DRGP to resolve my case as soon as possible and send travel permits via the headquarters of the regional branch (of the DRGP) in Donji Vakuf.29

Nadežda Rakić’s petition was typical, it seems, not just in terms of her request but in relation to the discourse she used to frame it. While she made it clear that her desperate situation is a direct result of the establishment of the new state and its in-clusion into Hitler’s new Europe, her letter contains no expressions of resentment: the tone of the letter is co-operative and conciliatory. Employing the language of compromise, she offers the directorate all her possessions apart from the most es-sential and leaves it up to DRGP officials to decide how much money she should be allowed to take. In a state characterised by the cult of work and sacrifice and in which beggars and vagrants had already been criminalised as “social parasites,” she presents her self-deportation as socially useful and economically beneficial. In other respects her petition is less typical, however: unlike other similar petitions, she does not assert her loyal past conduct towards the new state, her friendship with ordinary Croatians or her rejection of her Serbian identity. She is not – to use Dragostinova’s phrase – “nationally indifferent.” That aside, a striking aspect of her petition, something it shares with other Serbian petitioners, is its appropriation of Ustasha discourse to describe both her and her brother’s identity. She categorises them as “Greek Eastern” rather than Serbian Orthodox. As a literate woman, it is unlikely that she chose this linguistic turn of phrase by accident. In agreeing to categorise herself according to the terminology developed by the state, she is at-tempting to construct a shared language with the directorate’s officials and hasten her departure from the state in which she has become a “former” person.

A second category of petitions was represented by those Serbs who, unlike Rakić, did feel they had something to lose and wanted, against all the odds, to remain in the state, promising to play their role as loyal citizens. While these kinds of peti-tions came from all sections of Serbian society, they were particularly prevalent among wealthy and educated Serbs, despite the enormous risks they ran daily as both national and class enemies. An evocative example of this category of peti-tion was one sent by Dušan Gajić, a wealthy Serbian businessman from Bosanska Krupa the week before Nadežda Rakić had written. As his petition to the local GUS branch makes clear, despite his Serbian origins and privileged social status, he is keen to show that he has absorbed the new state’s social ideology and is in the pro-cess of remaking himself as a model subject:

I, the undersigned, have decided from my own awakened consciousness and not as the result of any outside influence to donate one of my houses to the Independent State of Croatia, a house which is located in the region of Otok

29 “Molba Rakić Nadežde – Nade, grko-istočne vjere, rodom iz Donjeg Vakufa, žene Rakića Dušana učitelja rodom iz Kragujevca (Srbija) i Tihomir Kalaba, grko-istočne vjere, moli seobu u Kragujevac (Srbija),” 18 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/OS, 446.1067/1738/41.

near the railway station and has no debts attached to it. Seeing that the for-mer Serbs from the town of Bihać have been evacuated and believing that the same thing could happen to us, I hope that in this way in the event of an evacuation, through this offer my family and I would be spared. I have never been actively involved in politics, but as a local businessman have only ever been involved in agriculture and commerce. Additionally, I swear I will be a loyal and diligent citizen of the Independent State of Croatia and that I will obey all its laws and legal statutes. I hope that my above suggestion to present a gift will be approved and my request for myself and my family taken into consideration. I eagerly await your reply for the homeland prepared.30

The Bosanska Krupa GUS official who read Gajić’s letter, Husein Muradbegović, did not know how to answer it, and eventually it found its way to the DRGP. But it was not just the petition’s offer but its language which must have confused officials. Su-perficially, Gajić claims an inner transformation—his “awakened consciousness”—as the motivation for the gift of a house, yet it is also clearly a bribe. He is appealing to the greed of local officials for the assets of Serbs and Jews, volunteering to sur-render part of his wealth in return for personal salvation. While Gajić’s petition, like Rakić’s, is a narrative of submission, he appropriates the new discourse more enthusiastically, employing the Ustasha greeting which all Croatian citizens were supposed to use: “For the homeland prepared.” In this way, he represents himself and is asking to be seen as part of the society coming into being. On the other hand, Gajić’s bribe was dangerous, since it put him into direct conflict with state ideol-ogy. Ustasha intellectuals assailed bribery as an economic pathology emblematic of the degeneracy of capitalism and liberal democracy; it also carried the death pen-alty. Furthermore, in the minds of many commentators, it was inextricably linked with the “corrupt” Serbian character. In making his proposal, Gajić not only risked death and called into question the honesty of state officials, but simultaneously reinforced negative stereotypes about the Serbs which must have rendered even more tendentious his stated claim that he would be a loyal citizen.31

One of the noticeable aspects of Gajić’s petition is the distance he places between his own family and the Serbs of Bihać, whom he describes as “former Serbs.” Yet Gajić’s use of this dehumanising Ustasha expression also expresses the genuine fear which lies underneath Gajić’s petition. By the time he wrote to his local GUS, the Serbs in Bihać were already a former people. Although he refers to them, in the euphemistic language of the state, as having been “evacuated,” as his petition implicitly suggests, they had been killed. At the beginning of June, the Ustasha leader for Bihać Ljubomir Kvaternik had ordered the arrest and incarceration of

30 “Molba Dušan Gajića pok. Betra, trgovac iz Otoke, kotara Bos. Krupa dozvola da može gruntovno darovati jednu svoju kuću u Otoki Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” 11 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/OS, 441.1076/4606/41.

31 See, for example, Josip Frajtić, “Neželjena baština,” Hrvatska gruda, 26 September 1941.

between 12,000 and 15,000 Serbian, Jewish and Gypsy men, women and children. Over the course of a couple of weeks they were liquidated by local Ustasha militias and their bodies thrown into mass graves in remote locations such as Garavice or the Una and Klokot rivers. Despite the totalitarian aspirations of the Ustasha state, news spread quickly, often through rumour and word of mouth; Gajić must surely have known what had happened. While in his petition he wanted to show that he had transformed his inner self, it was a transformation driven by terror in his soul.32

Not all Serbian petitioners were seeking escape from the state or undertaking to transform the self. Some Serbs believed that they had already demonstrated their loyalty even if in their petitions they often acknowledged their precarious status. Into this category fell Živojin Janković, a teacher of religion from Hrvat-ska Mitrovica languishing with his family in a resettlement camp in Slavonska Požega. In the petition sent by his sister Smiljka to the directorate on 29 July 1941, she emphasised his demonstrations of loyalty to the state as a public employee but added that he and his family would permanently leave the state and give up all right to his property and the right of return as the law stipulated if the directorate decided: “I, the undersigned Smiljka Janković from Hrvatska Mitrovica, as the sister of Živojin Janković, a religious teacher from Hrvatska Mitrovica who was arrested by the Ustasha authorities on the night of 11 July together with his family and on 20 July transferred to Slavonska Požega beg that he and his family be released, because as a state official he has taken the oath to the Poglavnik and from the attached it has been visibly affirmed that his conduct was good morally and politically and he never went against the Croats but on the contrary lived side by side with them in the greatest friendship. In-sofar as they must move from the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, they will voluntarily leave this territory and in that case ask that you permit my brother to resettle with his family taking all his movable goods and furniture from this territory.” An attached letter from the local Ustasha camp leader of Hrvatska Mitrovica confirmed that Janković had taken the compulsory vow of loyalty to the Poglavnik and was known to be “a respectable citizen of the city of Mitrovica.”33

Janković’s request on behalf of her brother and her family seems to have been unsuccessful: at any rate, a note in the margin of her request—“verbally re-jected!”—points in that direction. While it is not clear why the request was turned down, the directorate was especially suspicious of Serbian priests and those whose work was connected with the Serbian Orthodox Church. As the main bearer of a distinct Serbian national consciousness, Ustasha intellectu-

32 On the terror in Bihać and more widely in Herzegovina see, for example, Danilo Tunguz Petrović, Stradanje Srba u Hercegovini za vreme ‘Nezavisne Države Hrvatske’ (Novi Sad: Dobriša knjiga, 2006), 11–15.

33 Petition from Smiljka Janković to the DRGP, 29 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/OS, 449.1076/2886; testimonial from camp leader of the Hrvatska Mitrovica Ustasha camp, 28 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/OS, 449.1076, unnumbered.

als believed that it constituted a major barrier to the assimilation of the Ser-bian masses. Consequently, among the first Serbs to be liquidated or deported were Orthodox priests and their families, and special resettlement camps were set up for them. Meanwhile, across the state Serbian Orthodox churches were being destroyed and Serbian Orthodox societies closed down. This was ac-companied by a campaign of demonization in the press to mobilise popular Catholic opinion against the church. In this context, the prospects for Janković were never likely to be good or his declarations of loyalty taken seriously. In other cases, though, where Serbs combined evidence of past service for the Croatian nation with declarations that they had, in some sense, already “trans-formed” themselves into Croats, thus escaping a false and shameful Serbian past, their petitions were sometimes successful. On 30 July 1941, the director of the DRGP, Josip Rožanković, wrote to officials to order the immediate re-lease from Caprag resettlement camp of Dušan Prodanovic, a student and the son of Milan Prodanovic, a Croatian Domobran (home guard) veteran. In his circular to the commander of the Caprag camp, the directorate of the Ustasha Police in Zagreb and Milan Prodanovic in Zagreb, he explicitly included the Prodanovic family within the Croatian national community. He ordered the “immediate release” of Dušan not only on the grounds that Milan Prodanović was a “member of the family of Croatian domobrans who has committed no crimes against the Croatian spirit,” but also on the basis that he had converted to Catholicism from Orthodoxy, as Dušan had intended to do before he was arrested. Moreover, as he pointed out, Milan had submitted an application to join the Croatian army as an active officer and was the recipient of a state pen-sion from the Independent State of Croatia. In his initial petition to the DRGP, Milan Prodanovic himself had offered a heartfelt picture of his son’s plight, strongly asserting his Croatian identity or at least his aspiration to be thought of as Croatian. His confessional correspondence speaks of someone who be-lieves himself always to have been emotionally and intellectually a Croat, irre-spective of his former Orthodox religion, with a commitment to educating his children in the same spirit:

My son Dušan Prodanovic, a student at the Higher Commercial School, was led away from his house at midday on 14 July to the Zagrebački zbor [trade fair] and is now in Caprag. I am a retired Croatian domobran battalion leader who at the time of the [first] world war was involved on all kinds of battlefields and was awarded medals for my service in the war for our homeland. I never wanted to serve in the Yugoslav army. At the time of my retirement I was not involved in politics in any way and nor did I belong to any kind of society which would harm our homeland. As such I endeavoured to bring up my chil-dren in such a way that they were good patriots and sons of this homeland...I have just submitted an application for entrance into our Croatian army and hope that I will be accepted as an active officer because I have never commit-ted any crimes and in fact continue to receive a pension from the Indepen-

dent State of Croatia. Seeing as I am convinced that my son has done nothing which would damage our homeland or would do anything, I am begging you to release him to home and freedom and I will continue to look after him under military discipline. As evidence that I feel love towards our homeland, I underwent religious conversion but my son Dušan has also submitted an application to convert but seeing as he couldn’t collate all the documents im-mediately, it has been a little delayed, seeing as what’s befallen him.

Prodanović’s petition was received by the directorate on 28 July and within two days Rožanković had already ordered instructions for the immediate release of Prodanović’s son. Whether the speed with which the petition was resolved was a result of personal connections or, less likely, its heartfelt nature, is not clear.34

While Serbs like Nadežda Rakić, Dušan Gajić and Milan Prodanović were writ-ing to the DRGP, Jews were writing to ŽORUR asking for permission to be exempt from wearing the Jewish insignia. Like the petitions from Serbs, those from Jews frequently evoked the language and values of the state. In contrast to petitions from Serbs in which they often expressed their disengagement from politics and national identity, Jewish petitions frequently argued for an exemp-tion on the basis of their active involvement in the cause of Croatian liberation. Rather than national indifference, Jewish petitions expressed the desire to be recognised as the Croatians they believed they already were, in this way tran-scending their religious and, as far as Ustasha race ideologues were concerned, racial origins. As they explained in their petitions, the Jewish insignia was for them not only a humiliating stigma but a physical manifestation of the barrier separating them from the community to which they fervently wished to be-long. For Leopold Müller, writing to ŽORUR in June 1941, it was nothing less than “a sign of shame”, while in the opinion of twenty-nine-year-old Vitomir Krauth, “the most tragic aspect of my life is that my ancestors were Jews and so am I.” As he explained, it was particularly tragic because “from my earli-est childhood I always declared and felt myself to be in everything a Croat.”35 Sometimes, Jewish petitioners invoked the very anti-Semitic state laws which had consigned them to wearing the Jewish insignia in defence of their exemp-tion as a means of reinforcing their commitment to the state and its values. Auriel Gorjan, an engineer from Zagreb, pointed out that wearing the Jew-ish insignia would not only expose him to ridicule but contravene the state’s own commerce laws committing tradesmen not to bring their professions into disrepute. “Under section thirty three of the statute governing the authorisa-tion of engineers, I am required to protect the reputation and honour of my profession. I would be a laughing stock in the eyes of others if I had to carry

34 Petition from Milan Prodanović to the DRGP, 28 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/ SO/OS, 449.1076/ unnumbered; “Rješenje,” 30 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/ OS, 449.1076/2760/41.

35 Petition from Leopold Müller to ŽORUR, 12 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ravnateljstvo Ustaškog redarstva/Židovski odsjek (hereafter RUR/ŽO), 20.252/27462; Vitomir Krauth to ŽORUR, 5 May 1941, HDA, NDH, RUR/ŽO, 20.252/27462.

out my work wearing the Jewish insignia.”36 Likewise, Artur Takač, a twenty-three-year-old athletic star from Varaždin and founder of the town’s first ice hockey club, in a petition sent directly to the Poglavnik, sought to reinforce the legitimacy of the state’s anti-Semitic laws as a means of underlining why an ex-ception should be made on the basis of his sacrifices for the Croatian nation.37 In so doing he affirmed not only the just nature of the Ustasha state but demar-cated a space between himself and other “non-Aryans” who, by implication, deserved to wear the insignia. Presenting himself as a loyal citizen who wants to be actively involved in its construction, especially on the athletic field, while he does not use the word “Jewish” at all, he nevertheless undermines the state’s anti-Semitic tropes about the supposedly physical weakness and indolence of the Jews as he seeks to reinforce his “otherness” and ability to transcend his Jewish origins:

Creating the laws on race membership, you had in mind, our Poglavnik, those who by birth belong under the constraints of those laws, but who with their life and their work are to be separated from the majority of non-Aryans and who are unselfish and sincere Croatian nationalists and whose life’s work is devoted to the awakening of the national consciousness as well as to the prog-ress and prosperity of our nation in whatever field. You have promised these people that from your own farsightedness and generosity you will grant them all the rights which belong to people of Aryan origin if you find that they are worthy of this honour. In the national organism, in the intertwining of state relations, there are countless acts which by their nature are modest and un-noticed and yet have a great influence on the life and development of the na-tion. One of these activities is sport. The great Führer of the German Reich from the start understood the importance of sport in awakening the national consciousness and the benefit of hardening the younger generation. Right from the start of our young state, it was noticeable that you understood the overwhelming importance of physical culture and you dedicated particular attention to it. Among the countless young athletes who dedicated themselves to sport I attempted with my modest means to make a contribution to the hardening of the Croatian soul and body for the most sublime struggle: the liberation of the nation.38

Ela Sudarević, a thirty-four-year-old tailor’s assistant from Zagreb, similarly challenged anti-Semitic stereotypes—in her case the “bourgeois” trope—but unlike Takač was explicit in her disdain for her co-religionists. While she con-

36 Petition from Aurel Gorjan to ŽORUR, 5 July 1941, HDA, NDH, RUR/ŽO, 20.252/27571. 37 Poglavnik was the official title of the leader of the Ustasha movement and Ustasha state, Ante

Pavelić. In the sense of a supreme leader, it was close to the fascist Il Duce and National Socialist Der Führer. However, it also implied a tribal chief and tapped into the Ustasha idealisation of the village Zadruga, the basic organisational unit of rural life.

38 Petition from Artur Takač to the Office of the Poglavnik, 28 May 1941, HDA, NDH, RUR/ŽO, 32.252/2341.

ceded the profound difficulties having to wear a yellow star and being classified as Jewish would cause her, she made it clear that being publicly marked as Jew-ish would be a sign of moral defeat for her since it would associate her with an identity she no longer felt part of and a community whose values she did not share. She pointed out that she had converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1937, and that despite coming from a Jewish family she had a modest occupa-tion like most Croats, living a hand-to-mouth existence, barely able to afford the bare necessities and owning no property of her own. She had, she contin-ued, married a Croat, Slavko Sudarević, in 1937, and “we were always good Croats and felt Croatian.” Moreover, while, she wrote, “there are Jews in Zagreb who wear the designated sign with pride, considering themselves martyrs, (f )or me, this insignia is the greatest shame because I always felt myself to be a Croat and I will always feel like this. I am a tailor’s assistant, a worker, and so that I can continue to work ask to be exempted from wearing the Jewish sign. Despite attempts to find work in the past half year, my husband is unemployed, and if I was to be without a position and income that would mean catastrophe for us both.”39

While the context in which the cohort of young experts and students in the DRGP and ZavKol corresponded with these agencies was very different, the letters, reports, complaints and suggestions they wrote are just as important to understanding the dynamics of terror. While on the surface banal bureaucratic documents, they were also inherently emotional biographical documents, in-formed by expressions of desperation and optimism as well as ideological zeal. Take, for example, the application sent to the DRGP in early August by Josip Lončarević, a student at the Higher Economic and Commercial School in Za-greb from his home village of Bobovac in the Kostajnica region, where he was spending the vacation before returning to the capital for the autumn semester. Financially strapped, he requested a position on the basis of “the impossibility of completing my study owing to the poor material conditions.” A job would af-ford him the opportunity to finish his study at some point in the future. At the same time, however, he adds, working for the agency would enable him to “give all of my knowledge exclusively to this directorate and its work and contribute something to the construction of the homeland.” His letter is ambiguous: on the one hand, his language suggests he isn’t keen to postpone his economic studies—an increasingly common complaint among Croatian students in the 1940s—and offers his expertise for pragmatic career reasons. Yet his applica-tion also implies that he is motivated by the desire to play his part in building the state, thereby projecting an image of idealistic commitment for his pro-spective employer.40

39 Petition from Ela Sudarević to ŽORUR, 28 May 1941, HDA, NDH, RUR/ŽO, 31.252/missing serial number/41.

40 Petition from Josip Lončarević to the DRGP, 4 August 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/OS, 447.1076/141/1550.

Who is to say that this sentiment wasn’t also genuine? Certainly, the profound-ly ideological culture of directorates like the DRGP and ZavKol and their excit-ing promises of social engineering encouraged these kinds of attitudes. In fact, the correspondence of the cohort of young experts suggests that once they had been recruited, irrespective of their original motivations, they refashioned themselves according to the state’s utopian visions. Often highly ambitious and aware career advancement was linked to effectiveness in carrying out policy, many of them demonstrated an extremely radical attitude to resolving the Ser-bian “problem,” unabashedly criticising the perceived hesitation or corruption of older colleagues and party comrades. The field report Janko Budinšćak, an agronomy student and researcher in ZavKol, sent to Josip Rožanković express-es this dynamic well. Having undertaken a tour of the Kutina and Čazma re-gions to see how the colonisation programme was progressing, he concluded that the situation was far from perfect. Local Ustasha officials, he complained, were failing to provide him with the information he required, meaning that in some areas he had no idea what was going on; he was particularly dissatisfied with the state of affairs in Kutina, about which he had heard many negative stories. He noted with disdain that under the local Ustasha leader, Dr Stanić, “great disorder and indecision” prevailed. “He is too closely connected with the Serbs and the Jews though he could energetically and decisively proceed against them if he wanted to. We must, however, acknowledge that Kutina is overwhelmingly controlled by the Serbs and the Jews. All the large industries are in their hands. The bank is also Jewish, and Dr Stanić used to be its direc-tor. As far as I am aware, Dr Stanić is an old Ustasha fighter and he is a very good and decisive warrior, but as an organiser he has demonstrated weakness, and because of this disorder and indecision reign.” Nor was he satisfied with the new Ustasha adjutant for the region, Ivan Kuštreb, “insofar as I have heard from colleagues that he was never in Ustasha ranks and even keeps company with Communists. I think it would be better if Mile Begedin, a student of for-estry and actually born in Kutina, were to be put in his position.” No doubt, he added, he would act more “uncompromisingly,” “decisively” and “radically.” Only youth, he implied, had the radicalism and energy to see through the so-cial, racial and demographic revolution the Ustasha state demanded.41

41 Janko Budinšćak, “Izvještaj o služebenom putovanju u kotareve Kutine i Čazma,” 7 July 1941, HDA, NDH, Ponova/SO/OS, 447.1076/141/127/41

SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN SOVIET RUSSIA AND NAZI GERMANY

In the original sense of the term used by the French philosopher Michel Fou-cault, subjectivity referred to the struggle to retain a sense of self in the face of capitalist society and hence was intrinsically linked to ideas of resistance.42 In the modern historiographical context, subjectivity is more commonly associ-ated with the study of individual subjects whose sense of self is not produced by resistance to the state but, at least in part, by the embrace of it.43 In the So-viet context, one of the first studies to take seriously the Stalinist subject was Stephen Kotkin’s ground-breaking study Magnetic Mountain. Viewing Stalin-ism “as a civilisation,” he set out to explore the industrial project in Magni-torsk and how it was mediated by the actions of its citizens. His study aimed to enable “these citizens to speak as much as possible in their own words,” guided by the belief that “the subject of inquiry should include not only what was repressed or prohibited but what was made possible or produced.” Kotkin argued that while Foucault “singled out resistances as perhaps the most impor-tant factor in the formation of modern subjectivity, he never gave resistances the empirical attention they deserved, nor did he spell out the kinds of com-promises resistances forced on would-be social engineers at the top.” While Foucault demonstrated the value of studying power relations at the macro level and its relevance to understanding the state, power in the Soviet Union, Kot-kin argued, was “not localized in a centralised state apparatus.” Kotkin instead proposed that “other everyday practices such as national surveillance and self-identification also sustained state power even where they existed alongside the state machinery”, reflecting the fact that Stalinism was a social identity and way of life as much as it was a system. In order to understand Stalinism, historians needed to explain “the mechanisms by which the dreams of the ordinary peo-ple and those of the individuals directing the state found common ground in the Soviet version of the welfare state” in a series of intersecting relationships.44

However, as Jochen Hellbeck argued in an essay in Kritika, one of the problems with Kotkin’s subjective approach was its emphasis on duality –the idea that Soviet citizens spoke one language in public in order to gain social advance-

42 Foucault’s ideas about subjectivity and state power are outlined in more detail in “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2nd ed., 223–257.

43 That said, some early studies of Soviet subjectivity during the Stalinist era drew on the diaries of citizens who were actively opposed as well as those who enthusiastically embraced Bolshevik ideology. See, for example, Veronique Garros, Natalia Korovskaya and Thomas Luhman, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press, 1997). See also Nina Lugovskaya, The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl: 1932–1937, trans. Joanne Turnhull (Moscow: Glas, 2003).

44 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1995), 22–23.

ment, special favours or avoid state surveillance in a time of terror, and another in private which corresponded to their true selves. While acknowledging the contribution Kotkin’s study had made to a better understanding of the way ordinary Russians had perceived themselves under the Stalinist system, he ar-gued that in proposing a distinction between a commitment to Soviet values, on one hand, and their true selves which emerge intermittently, on the other, Kotkin was reverting to the totalitarian model of “the authentic self that mani-fests itself in speaking out against the Soviet order as an act of resistance.” Kot-kin maintained the state-society duality despite his plea to cut across it, since he suggested that the state alone set the parameters for subjectivity, with no sense of self-mobilisation “not necessarily reducible to the agenda and practices of the Soviet state.” Moreover, Hellbeck continued, Kotkin’s approach was indica-tive of many studies of the relationship between citizens and the Soviet state which assumed the former remained aloof from its values. Privileging dissent as the only authentic form of agency, with social support denigrated as “inauthentic performa-tive acts masking an ulterior rationality”, provided little sense of the “value of posi-tive self integration into the regime.” Assuming Soviet subjects existed externally to the regime and were subjects only insofar as they resisted ignored the dynamic of social mobilisation characteristic of revolutionary regimes, turning a blind eye “to the primary, fundamental involvement of the individual in the political sys-tem, an involvement which preceded and in important ways determined possi-ble forms and purposes of dissent resistance.” Moreover, it credited individuals with “a questionable potential to engage the world of public norms, symbols, and practices in virtually limitless ways,” appropriating or subverting official ideology at will, “suiting their own and—this implies external—historical interests...Rather than inhabiting this environment, Soviet citizens appear to treat it as a theatre of public meaning with its distinct rituals but also with its set of costumes and requisites that individual actors make use of in pursuit of their ulterior aims. One senses that historians have lost sight of the specific frames of meaning guiding in-dividual articulations and actions. Into the ensuing void of meaning scholars tend inadvertently to project their own liberal values on historical actors, endowing them with a liberal self-understanding and a striving for autonomy from the sur-rounding political environment.”45 Instead of thinking of Soviet citizens as “liberal subjects,” individuals “in pursuit of autonomy who cherished privacy as a sphere of self-determination,” as Hellbeck set out in his study of diary writing under Stalin, Soviet diaries “map an existential terrain marked by self-reflection and struggle,” revealing “an urge to write themselves into their social and political order.” Seek-ing to realise themselves as “historical subjects defined by their active adherence to a revolutionary common cause,” their personal narrators were “so filled with the values and categories of the Soviet revolution that they seemed to obliterate any distinction between a private and public domain. Many Stalin-era diaries were pre-

45 Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalin’s Russia,” Kritika 1, no. 1 (2000): 71–96, here 72–73.

occupied with finding out who they were in essence and how they could transform themselves.”46

Despite the growing influence of subjectivity in Soviet studies, some historians such as Laura Engelstein have faulted it for a lack of empirical rigour, arguing that it places interpretation ahead of evidence.47 By contrast, literary scholar Eric Naiman, while defending interpretation as essential to historiography, observes that too much subjectivity work is “so psychologically impoverished as to call into question the notion of a human subject at all.” Naiman also critiques subjectivity’s propensity to treat subjects as “characters” and to claim insight into the emotions and feelings of ordinary people. While the historian “can tell us what a person said or did, the disciplinary ground begins to shift when he writes about what people felt or thought.” Furthermore, if the psychology of subjects could be investigated and guessed at, then that would take away from them what was most interesting about them. “Can we do justice to the area of subjectivity and still believe in truth? Doesn’t writing about subjectivity require the replacement of truth with imagina-tion (and its accomplices: desire and style)?” In addition, Naiman raised questions about research ethics, in particular how accurately scholars were interpreting the personal correspondence of Soviet citizens in the context of the Stalinist system: “How effectively and affectingly is a particular human subjectivity expressed? How does the historical record left by a subject speak and what work does the scholar perform in the subject’s scholarly re-evaluation?” he asked. Interpretation was par-ticularly problematic in the Stalinist case, he argued, where subjectivity meant con-sciously speaking, acting and thinking in a particular way and where consequently the “notion of the self became increasingly unnatural.”48

Although subjective approaches have been less widely used in the study of Nazi Germany, the scholarship of Peter Fritzsche, in particular Life and Death in the Third Reich, has traversed much the same terrain as Soviet scholars, using the dia-ries and letters of ordinary Germans to explore the processes by which the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft (or people’s community) was able to transform German citizens into conscious subjects of the Third Reich. In his study, Fritzsche argued that patterns of life and death were inextricably linked in the Third Reich. “Politi-cal activity was premised on both supreme confidence and terrifying vulnerabil-ity; both states of mind co-existed and continually radicalised Nazi policies. The sense of ‘can do’ was wrapped in ‘must do.’ This combination released enormous energies as millions of Germans participated in public life to renovate, protect and preserve the nation.” Nazism aimed at animating the German people to “act as a self-consciously ethnic union. It deliberately set about revising the way Germans

46 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2–5, 11, 13.

47 Laura Engelstein, “Paradigms, Pathologies and other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (winter 1998): 864–77.

48 Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars who Make Them,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 307–15, here 311–12, 314.

looked at each other so that they would recognise the national community they belonged to as an active subject in world history.” Fritzsche noted that contempo-rary German history invariably viewed Germans as autonomous from the Nazis, at the least in the ideological sphere. Histories of everyday life had continued the theme of individual autonomy accepting at most that German citizens entered into a system of negotiation to acquire benefits. By contrast, Fritzsche contended that National Socialism was built from below as well as above, “a vast project for so-cial, political and racial renewal” which offered German people a range of ways in which to participate. While ordinary Germans approached Nazi policies informed by opportunism, fear, ideological conviction, laziness or apathy, National Socialism “exerted strong pressure on citizens to convert, to see the credibility of the people’s community and to recognise one another as ‘racial comrades’” through a series of institutional settings aiming at ideological conversion such as community camps. “What this meant was that individuals debated for themselves the whole question of becoming —of becoming a National Socialist, a comrade, a race-minded Ger-man, of remaining true to the old or joining the new. They grappled with questions about the importance of fitting in, the conventions of going along and the responsi-bilities the individual owed to the collective. Thus, the careful differentiations that scholars have made as motivation were themselves objects of scrutiny in Nazi Ger-many...The outcomes of these examinations varied from person to person but the process gave them an ideological inflection. This struggle is what Germans came to share in the Third Reich.” Like historians of Soviet subjectivity, Fritzsche main-tained that sources through which individuals represented the self, while not nec-essarily statistically representative, could nevertheless capture the conversations and thoughts Germans were having in a time full of idealism and terror: “They ex-pose the fears, desires and reservations of contemporaries and they show how they fitted into everyday life.” As a genre, he added, diaries were especially appropriate, since they corresponded to “the autobiographical work that the Nazis themselves encouraged across Germany.” If the National Socialist revolution “intensified self-scrutiny,” ordinary Germans were “self-conscious deliberate subjects.”49

SUBJECTIVITY AND USTASHA TERROR

The diaries and letters of Soviet and Nazi citizens in the 1930s are different in key respects from the correspondence of subjects of the Ustasha state. Aside from the different audiences the two groups were writing for and the political context in which they were writing, many Soviet and Nazi subjects sought in their writing to

49 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5, 8–9, 16–17.

answer the question, “Who am I?” By contrast, ordinary citizens who wrote to the DRGP or ŽORUR were often asking a more urgent question: “What will happen to me?” Whereas there is extensive scholarship on public opinion and the diverse ways in which ordinary people interacted with totalitarian states as beneficiaries, supplicants and victims, the majority of studies have tended to concentrate on those who in theory, at least, had a reasonable expectation of becoming members of the new society.50 On the other hand, subjects like Nadežda Rakić and Vitomir Krauth were writing from the knowledge that their future was bleak at best, no matter how much they insisted otherwise, and hence their petitions were charac-terised by desperation and dread.

Given the background against which ordinary Serbs and Jews wrote petitions, it might make sense to use Theodora Dragostinova’s typology of “emergency iden-tity” as Emily Greble, for one, has suggested. In her study of everyday life in Sara-jevo under Ustasha rule, Greble contends that “playing by the rules of the regime offered some Serbs the best chance for surviving the critical emergency situation. By not joining the resistance, keeping a low profile and above all by converting to the Croatian Orthodox Church, Serbs could make public declarations of their loyalty and intent to remain bystanders in the civil war offering tacit agreement to support—at least for the time being—the Croatian nation state.”51 On the face of it, the idea of “speaking national” and “emergency identity”, as well as the concept of national indifference, fits well with many of the petitions sent to the DRGP and ŽORUR in the summer of 1941 by Serbs. They fit less well with the petitions of Jewish authors or the sentiments expressed in Milan Prodanović’s petition, since these suggested not so much national indifference as declarations of belonging to the Croatian nation—or at least the intense desire to be thought of in such a way. In fact, even in the case of Serbian victims of Ustasha terror such as Dušan Gajić and Nadežda Rakić, there is a problem in applying Dragostinova’s model in the way Greble advocates. First, while Greble’s argument is useful from the perspec-tive of spring 1942, when the worst of the terror was over, a Croatian Orthodox Church had been established and the state had begun the process of transforming the “former Serbs” into “Orthodox Croats” under German tutelage, in the summer of 1941 ordinary Serbs such as Dušan Gajić and Nadežda Rakić did not have the option of being invisible. While Greble is correct in insisting that Serbs in some parts of the state had choices, no matter how limited those choices were—fleeing to Serbia, joining the resistance or becoming an Orthodox Croat—those options

50 See, for example, Kevin McDermott, “‘A Polyphony of Voices? Czech Popular Opinion about the Slánsky Affair,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 840–65; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996): 80–104; Letters to Hitler, ed. Henrik Eberle with an introduction by Victoria Harris (London: Polity Press, 2012); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany; idem, “Denunciation and Nazi Germany: New Insights and Methodologies,” Historical Social Research 22, no. 314 (1997): 225–239; Paul Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2012); idem, Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism (Oxford University Press, 2009).

51 Greble, “When Croatia Needed Serbs,” 136.

did not present themselves until much later. In the summer of 1941, the thousands of Serbs who sent desperate petitions to the DRGP were faced with far more drastic choices: to leave the state and everything you knew behind or to become some-how invisible. The alternative was the dreaded resettlement camps, a slow death through starvation or—as Dušan Gajić must have feared—mass liquidation.

While Serbs and Jews learnt to “speak national” there was arguably a distinction in the way they used this new national language. Many Serbian petitioners appropri-ated the state’s discourse in order to speak about themselves, thereby reinforcing their alien status outside the national Croatian community. However, even when expressions like “former Serbs” were used by writers such as Gajić to distinguish themselves from the Serbian masses, few Serbs, including him, sought to disavow their national identity even as they expressed their indifference to national identity. Moreover, they did not generally aspire to join the Croatian national community; the most they hoped for was to become invisible or escape. Of course, this didn’t apply to Milan Prodanović, who asserted that he was Croatian and imbued with a highly-developed Croatian consciousness. By contrast, in the petitions of Jews like Ela Sudarevic, Vitomir Krauth and Artur Takač there was a narrative of transfor-mation; they expressed the aspiration to become members of the national commu-nity, asserting both their national similitude to the Croatian national community and, in many cases, their separateness from a Jewish community they viewed with shame and disdain. Of course, Bulgarian Greeks had employed similar conceptual strategies in seeking to avoid deportation in the 1920s. Still, Dragostinova’s version of emergency identity suggested a high level of contingency and pragmatism on the part of those adopting the emergency identity in spite of their emotional dec-larations of Bulgarian nationalist fervour. Were all the Jews who wrote to ŽORUR consciously attempting to game a system in which the cards were horribly stacked against them? What are we to make of Serbs who proclaimed both political and national indifference? How much should we accept Milan Prodanović’s declaration on its own terms? This is where subjective approaches add context. Studies of the politics of interwar Yugoslavia suggest that by the late 1930s the majority of prečani Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia were voting in non-ethnic ways for anti-centralising parties such as the Croatian Peasant Party. This suggests that a “national” identity among Serbs living outside Serbia was not as strong as Ustasha propaganda in-sisted it was.52 Similarly, while Zionist tendencies were rising among the Jewish community in Croatia, as they were throughout Yugoslavia in the 1930s, some Jews favoured complete integration into Croatian national life and advocated support

52 See, for example, Joseph Rothschild, “Yugoslavia,” in his A History of East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1974), 257–60. However, following the Sporazum (agreement) of September 1939 between the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Dragiša Cvetković, and the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Maček, creating an enlarged autonomous Croatian Banovina, this situation changed significantly, and there were increasing calls for autonomous regions in areas of the Banovina in which Serbs represented the majority population. On this, see Dejan Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (London: Hurst and Company, 2007), 269–82.

for radical forms of Croatian nationalism.53 Thus, although it is safe to assume that many petitioners were attempting to mediate their positions in the new state in a perilous position, in some cases the sentiments they expressed probably accurately expressed their genuine feelings. While we see Vitomir Krauth as a victim of terror it is not at all clear that this was the way he saw himself: rather than positioning himself as a victim, his letter finds fault with himself for his shameful origins. Fur-thermore, unlike Dragostinova’s study, which understandably privileges the voices of the victims of the Bulgarian deportation campaigns, a subjective approach pro-vides a way to understand the self-representation and processes of refashioning undergone by the officials who devised and implemented this policy and and hence how the interaction of these groups influenced the course of the terror.

It isn’t clear what happened to all the subjects in this story: Nadežda Rakić and Dušan Gajić’s stories come to an end, in the Croatian archives, at the point they wrote their original petitions. While there is no confirmation in the archives that Živojin Janković perished, it seems likely that he did. On 26 August 1941, at around seven in the evening, unable to bear the conditions in the Slavonska Požega camp, the deportees rioted, wounding one DRGP guard. In the aftermath, as a briefing that evening from the Headquarters of the Osijek Regional Division reported, the guards liquidated all four hundred detainees, adding that the regional authorities were undertaking a full investigation. It seems almost certain that despite his sis-ter’s plea and the recommendation from his local Ustasha camp, the young reli-gious studies teacher from Hrvatska Mitrovica was not released and was among the camp’s victims.54 The student Dušan Prodanovic was released from internment, but for how long is anybody’s guess. As subsequent months were to show, conver-sion to Catholicism and even volunteering for the armed forces were no guarantee of survival for Serbs in the face of violent militias and fanatical Ustasha activists. Many Serbs who, like Dušan’s father, were initially saved, genuinely believing them-selves to be Croats, were later swept away in the terror. More is known about the Jewish petition writers. Despite his petition, which spoke so powerfully to his sense of Croatian identity, Vitomir Krauth was among the first transport of Jews to the Jasenovac death camp in the autumn of that year, and he was dead by the winter. The engineer Aurel Gorjan, so worried about his standing among his peers, met the same fate.55 Artur Takač did survive, however, and built a new life in post-war Belgrade. The official account of how he managed to escape the Holocaust does not correspond to the archival evidence. This is perhaps not surprising, since the

53 The different attitudes within the Jewish community in Zagreb towards Zionism, anti-Semitism and integration are discussed briefly in Goldstein and Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 28–31, 619–25. It is likely these patterns were replicated among Jewish communities in other Croatian towns and cities (though not in Bosnian ones) in the 1920s and 1930s.

54 “Izvještaj zapovjedništva osječkog divizijskog područja od 26 Avgusta 1941 o pobuni 400 Srba zatvorenika u koncentracionom logoru u Slavonskoj Požegi zbog čega su poubijani od strane Ustaša,” VII, Vojni arhiv, ANDH, 1/262 cited in Nikola Živković and Petar Kačavenda, Srbi u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj: izabrana dokumenta (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1998), 266.

55 Goldstein and Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 144.

post-war Yugoslav state encouraged ordinary people to identify themselves with the new social and national orthodoxies through the construction and invention of the self in ways not dissimilar to the Ustasha state, though without the atten-dant mass terror. Takač’s autobiographical narrative of this period, which removed him completely from Croatia at the time he wrote his petition to the Poglavnik, relocating him first in a labour camp in Italy and then as an active participant in the anti-fascist struggle, enabled him to build a career as one of Yugoslavia’s most celebrated sports trainers. Takač was the exception rather than the rule: few Jews in Croatia who applied for honorary Aryan status received it, and many of the small number whose applications were successful were later murdered.56 The fates of Josip Lončarić, Janko Budinšćak and the other young members of the cohort are a gaping void by comparison. While they make intermittent appearances in documents, submissions, minutes of meetings and disciplinary reports, their sto-ries and ultimate fates were, for the most part, swept away in the post-war purges which followed the collapse of the Ustasha state.

If studies of subjectivity usually concentrate on private correspondence and self–expression, then what is noteworthy about many petitions to the DRGP and ŽORUR is their intimate, self-critical and confessional tone, onto which shame, hope, desperation, fear and idealism are etched. The correspondence of those who worked or aspired to work for these agencies might not have shared these qualities, but they are just as meaningful and important to an understanding of terror in the Ustasha state as the petitions Serbs and Jews sent. In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s novel about memory, history and truth in twentieth-century Canada, the narrator Iris Griffin-Chase says that the novel which she wrote anonymously but published under her dead sister Laura’s name was a collaborative effort: “Laura was my left hand and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It’s a left-handed book. That’s why one of us is always out of sight whichever way you look at it.”57 For a long time, Holocaust history has arguably operated under a similar premise, privileging the actions of perpetrators at the expense of both survivor testimony and the sto-ries of those who did not survive. Paradoxically, their letters, diaries and petitions provide a powerful picture not just of their own lives and deaths, but make an im-portant contribution to understanding of the dynamics of genocide. If it is true, as Margaret Atwood has written, that “every sober-sided history is at least half sleight of hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets,” then widening the scope of the subjective canon allows us to keep all our subjects in the picture in a way Atwood’s Iris Chase Griffin is not able to do.58 Subjectivity does not imply moral neutrality, but it does place the individual at the centre of their own story. Janko Budinšćak, Nadežda Rakić and Vitomir Krauth were from the same generation, socialised in the same Yugoslav state and – briefly

56 For details see Goldstein and Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 132–44. 57 Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (London: Virago, 2000), 518. 58 Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (Toronto: McClellan and Stewart, 1993), 518.

– Ustasha subjects, with all the emotions that provoked. Although they never met, through the petitions of ordinary people and the internal correspondence of the officials, it is possible to reconstruct what everyday life was like in a time of terror from multiple perspectives: how ordinary people thought, acted, lived and, above all, felt. In an extraordinary period in the summer of 1941, the otherwise banal practice of writing to a ministry was transformed into a search for survival and a quest to refashion the inner self.

Between Terror and Self-Transformation: Subjectivity, Petition Writing and Survival under Ustasha...

Documents

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&l OCT 1942 - Cambridge University Press

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The cavalry in the Wehrmacht 1942 - 45

Feb. 17, 1942. M. BONOTTO 2,273,557

Herring v. USA Petition for Certiorari

46th Naval Construction Battalion (1942-1945)

Petition for Charter Renewal 2021-2026

RESPONDING TO A PETITION FOR SEPARATION

Remembering Dr Saleem Al-Wardi (1942-2015)

Petition - Supreme Court

Nº 014 1942 Enero - Publicaciones Defensa

PETITION CALLING FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND

The Power of Individual Subjectivity and the Subjectivity of Power in Education

Rethinking Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept

Double the Pell Petition

Postsubjectivity - Subjectivity after its different ends