Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe by Emily Greble (review)

In the famous 1972 Yugoslav partisan film, “Walter Defends Sarajevo,” the Germans are chasing a mysterious partisan leader called Walter, who is never seen and always escapes. “Who is Walter?” they keep on asking. At the end film, they realize: Walter is the collectivity of Sarajevans, who fight and obstruct German occupation unitedly. In her book on the history of Sarajevo during World War II, Emily Greble challenges the communist praise of Sarajevo as being a resisting city. But as does the film, she identifies a phenomenon that is not only as hard to grasp, but also as powerful as “Walter”: Sarajevo’s multicultural spirit, which derived from the multitude of the city population’s actions.

Greble tells the story of how the largest Muslim city of wartime Europe was forged by ethnic cleansing, genocide, and shifts in the identity of its multi-ethnic population. The city’s population consisted of Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Ashekenazi and Sephardic Jews, and other minorities. Sarajevo is a remarkable and beautifully written book, which complicates the picture of Hitler’s Europe by discussing the difficult choices Sarajevo’s Muslims had to make during the war, and shedding new light on the supposed unholy alliance between Nazism and Islam.

Greble labels Sarajevo “a symbol of multiculturalism at its best,” and indeed the town embodied what Yugoslavia stood for more than any other place. Sarajevo is the place time-shared by the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and where Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox and Catholic Christianity interlocked. Greble aims to find out how the Sarajevo spirit was affected by WWII with its genocides, civil wars, and ethnic rifts taking place on Yugoslav soil.

In seven chapters, Greble portrays life in Sarajevo after the city became part of the Croatian Ustasha state in 1941. The city’s unique culture is explored in the first chapter, where Greble uses four biographies of local community leaders to demonstrate that they shared a commitment to their city, including its diversity. These four Sarajevan men, a Muslim, a Jew, a Croat, and a Serb, shared what Greble calls “civic consciousness,” or a form of local solidarity. According to the author, this peculiar Sarajevan spirit helps to explain why many inhabitants of the city were reluctant to support the racist Nazi and Ustasha programs. The biographic sketches also demonstrate the importance of the confessional traditions, which limited the sense of solidarity, as the religious communities were highly segregated from one another. Their actions, and the behavior of the members of the confessional communities, oscillated between these two poles.

In the second chapter, Greble discusses the Ustasha’s agenda to create an ethnically homogenized state cleansed of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. As the Ustasha claimed that only Catholics and Muslims counted as true Croats, more than a third of Sarajevo’s population found themselves in great peril once the Ustasha militias arrived at the city in May 1941. Ten percent of the city population alone consisted of Jews.

In the third chapter, Greble discusses how the city’s traditions and loyalties were tested. The argument is that the city’s elite opposed the Nazi and Ustasha racial concepts, and countered them with their conception of community based on religion and belonging to the city. Greble argues that the majority of the Muslim population met the Ustasha and their plans to reshape Sarajevo’s ethnic fabric with great reservation, and that the city officials deradicalized the course of ethnic cleansing as far as they could.

Chapters 4 and 5 give a vivid account of the city’s plight during the wartime years, and great insights as to how Muslims sought an answer to the question of what their place could be in the New Order, unclear as it was. This includes the meager successes of Tito’s partisans to recruit among the city population, their hope to be able to achieve autonomy by functionally cooperating with the Germans, but also the...