Violence as a Creative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community by Max Bergholz (review)

The frequent description of the Bosnian war of 1992–1995 as "the worst conflict in Europe since World War II" has had the perverse effect of deflecting attention from what went on there in 1941–1945, which was far worse than in the 1990s. In the 1992–1995 Bosnian war, approximately 102,000 people were killed, two-thirds of them Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), 19 percent Serbs and 8 percent Croats. In contrast, in the 1941–1945 war, approximately 300,000 were killed, 73 percent of them Serbs, 17 percent Muslims (now Bosniaks), and 5 percent Croats. Further, in the 1990s, slightly more than half of the overall casualties were military personnel, whereas in the 1940s the great majority of those killed were civilians, including many massacres of women and children. Those massacres were not a matter of industrialized or even mechanized death. Instead, masses of people were executed at close range, with firearms but also knives, axes, and even clubs, and then thrown into deep vertical caves or buried in shallow graves. In both cases, some still living were interred with the dead.

The extent of these massacres has long been known, though little studied, in part because of the tendencies to emphasize urban victims and, in the post-Holocaust world, to focus on concentration camps as the main embodiment of evil. Max Bergholz's book is thus extraordinary because of his focus on mass killings in a region of Bosnia that is still relatively remote, but even more so because of the depth of his research and the variety of his sources. His work was sparked by the chance finding of a few official accounts of events in the region, but he then engaged in nearly ethnographic-quality fieldwork, including interviews and use of private documents in the hands of perpetrators, survivors, and their families. One of the strengths of the work is Bergholz's recognition that these terms are cross-cutting: Survivors and family members of victims often became perpetrators in revenge massacres of the former perpetrators and their families.

The region is around the town of Kulen Vakuf, on the Una River, close to the border between Bosnia and Croatia as established in 1739 and recognized ever since. But although the border has been with Croatia, few of the inhabitants of the region were Roman Catholics, or Croats. From at least the mid-eighteenth century until the events in 1941 that are the subject of this book, most of the population were Muslims (now referred to as Bosniaks) and Orthodox Christians (now referred to as Serbs), the majority in the town itself being Muslims. The region was the border between the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires from 1739 to 1878, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire took control of Bosnia. Throughout this period, Muslims were the economic elite. Bergholz notes rising tensions between the Muslim elites and local Christians but stresses that the conflicts were sparked largely by class differences. Conflict occasionally arose between the religious communities throughout the nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth. The incorporation of Bosnia into the new Yugoslav state after World War 1 increased the power of the Orthodox Christians, by then largely identified as Serbs. Still, the various communities lived in relatively stable configurations and without much violence until 1941, when the mass killings analyzed by Bergholz occurred.

Yugoslavia's collapse in April 1941 ten days after the invasion by Germany and the Axis powers was followed by the conquerors' establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (generally known as NDH, for Nezavisna Država Hrvatska), a fascist puppet state with an odd ideology of race, religion, and nation. To the NDH, Bosnia was Croatian land because Muslims were viewed as being the descendants of converted Catholics and thus as really being Croats. Serbs on the other hand, were the racial, religious, and national enemy, to be "cleansed...