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178 ChaPTeR 4 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR TASTE Cultural Values after the Revolution of Blood w e were confronted with a wasteland and had to build everything from the ground up.” So recalled the regional leader of Prigorje Marko Lamešić regarding the task confronting the Ustasha movement immediately after it came to power. Speaking at an Ustasha rally in June 1942, Lamešić, standing on a speaker’s platform adorned with flowers and rugs and surrounded by flags and an altar for holy mass, told thousands of workers, peasants, and party supporters that if nothing else had been achieved in the past year other than “the complete tearing out of every foreign poison from the soul of the Croatian nation,” this was nevertheless “the greatest deed that could be imagined.” Today, he continued, Croatia was liberated and united, the Croatian people marching “with equally Croatian and Ustasha steps.” Should anyone dare to raise their hand against the motherland, he warned, they would be “annihilated by the thousands and thousands of hands defending it.” In his speech, meanwhile, Vilko Rieger, director of DIPU, linked social and economic regeneration to Lamešić’s national revolution. The Ustasha movement had struggled for political liberation, he explained, because “it is only in such a way that we can liberate ourselves in the social and economic sense.” Yet while the Ustasha movement had destroyed the “national prison” of Yugoslavia and ensured that it could never be rebuilt, there was still much work to be done. “We must,” he declared, “refashion our state from the inside.”1 “ social Justice and the campaign for Taste 179 The violent war for national liberation—the tearing out at the root of every “foreign poison” through mass murder and deportation—was thus the beginning, not the end, in the construction of a revolutionary Ustasha state: economic and social refashioning, as Rieger termed it, was a fundamental element in the movement’s concept of a utopian Ustasha society. For the movement ’s cultural visionaries, culture would be the driving force of this second revolution. As much as popular culture could serve a utilitarian function in popularizing the regime’s ideology among ordinary Croatian citizens, many in the movement advocated its centrality in the remaking and regeneration of Croatian society. Writing in early 1942, Mile Starčević, the head of the State Institute for National Enlightenment, declared that the Ustasha movement gave ideological expression to the literary-artistic traditions of revered nineteenth -century nationalist Croatian poets such as Antun Gustav Matoš, Silvije Kranjčević, and Fran Galović. The Ustasha movement was a liberation movement not just in the political and social sense of the word, he explained, but in the cultural sense too, because education was at the heart of all national questions. In the Ustasha conception of culture, he wrote, the state was an all-encompassing engine of national will and culture. Rather than simply a vanguard overseeing the development of culture according to established laws and statutes, the state should be viewed as an “active factor of culture” because it was only through the state that the nation could “completely express its creative will.” Cultural questions were, he argued, the most important factors in the life of the new state, above all economic, military, and administrative concerns.2 Culture had a social function, and Ustasha cultural ideologues wished to make it accessible to the masses. In Yugoslavia, they argued, culture had often been the preserve of a rarefied elite, closed to ordinary people as either spectators or participants. Theater was the symbol of a new spirit in the Croatian state following the national revolution of 1941. Dušan Žanko, the director of the Zagreb State Theater, envisaged the end of “small chamber theater for the élite”; instead theater for the masses would embrace “in its wings 20,000 people united in delirium and faith.”3 As the most important cultural institution , Žanko wrote, theater was a symbol of a new spirit and new life in Croatia following the national revolution of 1941. While the past two decades of crisis had been “saturated with despair and dizzy footstamping in the dark of lost humanity,” together with the “gloomy aesthetic and ethical wastelands of foreigners,” in the new era people from “the most different backgrounds can join together every evening in one artistic experience.”4 The Ustasha revolution was framed by Žanko in explicitly artistic and cultural terms. The national revolution could not be considered complete until a new...

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