Legacies of the Second World War in Croatian Cultural Memory: Women as Seen through the Media

Headnote

ABSTRACT

This article shows how the model of the ideal patriotic woman, established through propaganda activities between two competitive ideologies in Croatia during the Second World War, have been transformed and adapted to accommodate diverse genres of memory culture from 1945 until the present day. In order to indicate the interrelation of media-ideological constructs and self-definition, the authors have compared cultural representation models of 'acceptable' and 'obnoxious' females in war time with ethnographical interviews conducted with women at the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Antifasisticki front zena (Women's Anti-Fascist Front, AFZ) Istrian Conference in 2004. The contrast between recollections and culturally constructed official memory shows how the memories of women, as autonomous historical subjects, resist the imposed collective amnesia on the anti-fascist movement, although these women also leave many 'unsuitable truths' untold about their subordinate role within the anti-fascist movement.

KEYWORDS: Croatia, Second World War, Antifasisticki front zena (Women's Anti-Fascist Front, AFZ), cultural memory, war propaganda, gender, television

Introduction1

This article focuses on the different versions of hegemonic constructs of womanhood as represented in various forms of mass media in Croatia from the beginning of the Second World War to the present day. Our analysis is guided by George Steiner's assumption that not history as such, but images of history, rule us because 'symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility'.2 This assumption is also affirmed by feminist historians who question the naturalness of gender identities and emphasise the importance of cultural representations that convey the meanings of male and female as historically variable. Thus, over time the silenced 'herstories' about women's experiences of the Second World War have been replaced by suggestive popular images of 'new women', blurring the difference between the lived, individual and collective cultural memory. In addition, although it is a fact that 'female voices have been largely omitted from official histories', nonetheless, 'wartime experiences challenging traditional gender roles' have remained a mythic cornerstone, authenticating active, socially relevant and potentially subversive female identities that, more or less successfully, resisted the stereotyping imposed by media texts in both socialist and western popular culture.3

Our selection of the period covered by media texts analysed here comes from the observation of the...