Expellees Tell Tales: Partisan Blood Drinkers and the Cultural History of Violence after World War II

This article examines stories told after 1945 by ethnic German refugees from the Banat region of Yugoslavia about encounters they had with Partisans—fighters in Josip Broz Tito’s army—who had become vampires. The essay situates these tales firmly within their place of origin and views them as an idiom through which Yugoslavian Germans described wartime acts of, encounters with, and anxieties about violence. This idiom had diverse cultural roots, and was inflected by memories of partisan warfare in World War I, as well as by gender, religious culture and local folklore surrounding blood. Through a contextualized reading of stories about blood-drinking Partisans, the essay offers a window onto a psychology of violence and its legacies in the wake of war and makes a plea for taking fantasy and the monstrous seriously as objects of historical analysis.