Framing the Hero: Photographic Narratives of War in the Interwar. Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes

Transcription

1 1 Framing the Hero: Photographic Narratives of War in the Interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes Melissa Bokovoy, The University of New Mexico In late 1920, the internationally known Serbian photojournalist, Rista Marjanović( ) 1 wrote to the press bureau in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes requesting money for the reproduction, storage, and publication of his photographs, sketches, articles and documents that detailed the horrible suffering of the Serbian people, during the long wars. 2 In this letter, Marjanović worried that both those abroad as well as those within the new kingdom were beginning to forget or choosing not to remember the Serbian people s experiences during the Balkan wars and First World War and that there was the need to remember the heroic efforts and works of the Serbian people. He proposed the means to remember - pictorial propaganda. Drawing on his experience in the field of photojournalism, Marjanović argued that visual imagery could influence the popular masses in ways that dry text did not. He proposed not only creating a separate place for the collection and reproduction of such documents, but advocated the immediate production of an inexpensive album of photographs. Marjanović saw their creation as powerful tools for shaping, categorizing and solidifying memories of the war. He was neither an amateur nor was he alone in such efforts. Almost twenty years later, in spring 1939, another of Serbia s wartime photographers, Dragoljub Pavlović, exhibited over 700 photographs from the Balkan wars and the Great War in Belgrade. Jovan Obićan, in a review for Vreme wrote admiringly of war correspondents and photojournalists

2 2 We see them in the action films, with cameras in hand, in the trenches, bravely moving forward with the assault.... We see how, for the love of the sensational picture, they ignore common sense. In the moment when the soldier looks not to lose his head or seeks shelter, the war correspondent seizes that moment in the battle.... crouching, he braves thousands of dangers[for the picture]. 3 In the review of the exhibition and in the exhibition itself, there were no explicit references to the horrors of war, its cruel indignities, the suffering of those who died, or death as painful and grotesque. Instead this exhibition and a numerous and diverse array of pictorial representations produced from 1914 to the late 1930s, portrayed the Balkan wars and The First World War as conflicts in which the ideals of manliness, the honor of self-sacrifice, and romantic, redemptive death had been embraced by Serbs and presented Serbs as honorably and courageously fighting and dying for the liberation and unification of the South Slavs. 4 Over the last twenty years, the Serbian public had grown accustomed to seeing photographs displaying their best selves, a brave, selfless, heroic and self-sacrificing nation of citizen soldiers ready to do battle with the enemy in order to defend other south Slavic peoples. During the interwar period, patriotic photographic albums, collages, essays, and exhibitions, commemorative postcards and posters, calendars, and almanacs, and photographic films circulated among the citizens of Yugoslavia. However, the center of publication and distribution of such commemorative material was in Serbia where the publishing houses produced the bulk of this pictorial propaganda. 5 Relative to other types of commemorative sites or performances such as monuments, plaques, holidays and anniversary celebrations, photographs captioned in Cyrillic and depicting the Serbian war experience were the most accessible of all commemorative items. These were some of the first commemorative artifacts

3 3 produced and available to the Serbian public and helped to create the narrative of Serbia at war. This paper examines how official Serbia, i.e., the Serbian High Command, the royal court, military organizations loyal to the Karadjordjević dynasty, and Serbian politicians and intellectuals utilized photographs to shape how Serbian soldiers, their leaders, their defeats and their victories, were to be remembered among the citizens of Yugoslavia. These images told a distinctly Serbian story which became the hegemonic interwar narrative of the south Slavs wartime experience. From the very beginning of the Kingdom s founding, official war commemoration and remembrance focused almost entirely upon Serbian sacrifice and heroism and excluded the other peoples of the Kingdom, their wartime suffering, their deaths, and their sacrifices. 6 In the new kingdom, the official narrative emanating from military, royal, and political circles depicted the ideal citizen as male and who possessed a masculinity based on valor, honor, sacrifice, and selflessness. This ideal man, in photographs, was represented as a soldier who willingly marched to war, preferably with comrades, fought valiantly, protected the virtue of the innocent and weak, and sacrificed himself for his fellow soldiers, family, village, and nation.(image 1) This type of individual became the interwar model for the average citizen as many men came to see their experience at war, either in the Serbian or Austro-Hungarian armies, as a proving ground for manliness. 7 Male combatants had become privy to a sacred world which in the course of the war became ever more distinct from the profane world of the rear guard of the civilians. Returning to their homes, some veterans looked upon civilian leadership as incapable of meeting the challenges facing their national communities. In the case of Serbia, the Karadjordjević dynasty, officers in the Serbian Army, and Serbian politicians sought to legitimize their leadership in the new kingdom and its institutions and embraced the martial

4 4 masculinity memorialized in wartime pictures and stories. 8 Similar memorialization was taking place within political circles in Croatia. Some returning veterans to Croatia, many of whom had been POWs in Russia, became critical of the Croatian Peasant Party s leadership and Stjepan Radić's civic virtue and pacificism and during the 1920s called for a more revolutionary response to Belgrade s hegemony. 9 Thus, those who had struggled for and advocated unification and independence through different channels, such as political negotiation, compromise, and political declarations and trod a path of civic virtue could be portrayed as lesser citizens, not worthy of their community s foremost accolades, rewards or political leadership. 10 Interwar histories and remembrances of wartime experiences utilized gendered language, tropes, symbols and images to promote a myth of war experience 11 and those who survived and sacrificed were the ones fit to transform their national communities in both Serbia and Croatia. The adoption of martial masculinity in the service of liberation and unification as the highest of all male virtues in the Kingdom was greatly aided by the photographic albums and images circulating during and after the war which portrayed ideal manhood in the form of hypervirile martial images of men the gallant soldier, the vigilant protector, and the challenged paterfamilias. 12 (Images 2, 3 and 4) Even though Serbian women marched alongside their men, provided labor on the battlefield and behind, and bore the brunt of the Austrian and Bulgarian occupation after November 1915, the women celebrated and publically remembered as heroic were those very few who became actual soldiers or were foreign female doctors and nurses. During and after the war, Serbian women were mostly portrayed as victims, martyrs, and mourners. Displayed and published photographs helped reinforce this image of women as grieving, huddled, and helpless. (Images 5 and 6) In the case of Croats in interwar Yugoslavia, it was difficult to assert male privilege if

5 5 their contributions as volunteers in the Serbian Army and their service and sacrifices as soldiers of the Monarchy were not recognized, their images not publically displayed, or if the sacrifices and suffering endured by Croats during the war were seldom or only fleetingly acknowledged. In the hierarchy of masculinity within the new state, Serbian men could and would claim a position of first among equals. In addition, Serbian women s valor and heroism would rank higher than other South Slav men, even those who were Austro-Hungarian soldiers, and over other south Slav women. 13 In the successor states of central and south-eastern Europe after 1918, identifying, defining, and then celebrating patriots was neither obvious nor without substantial contestation and debate. Territorial conquests and annexations, declarations of independence, and international treaties created new states and citizenries whose wartime experiences were by no means the same. Prewar citizenship and imperial or state loyalties, prewar and wartime politics, ideological proclivities, and class, ethnic, and gender identities made the telling of a unified, homogenous wartime narrative impossible without the ability of the new states and their elites through different commemorative forms and acts to transform real experiences into mediated ones. It is within this mediated form that the actions and experiences of individuals are defined, celebrated, and solidified as patriotic and heroic, or sacrificial. Yet how did the successor states transform the real into the mediated? Recent scholarship on this issue has documented how national and political elites of the interwar period utilized the resources and instruments of state building to privilege and promote one or two dominant heroic narratives stemming from the Great War and obscured or vanquished the experiences of others. 14 Holidays, monuments, commemorative memorabilia, and memoir literature of the Great War focused the new citizenry of the successor states on those moments

6 6 that involved a battle or action sequence which could be construed as sacrificing for and defending the nation. Often the very first medium to focus the public s attention on a specific event and the actions of their soldier was the news story sometimes accompanied by photographs. News stories and photographs operated as narratives that transformed the real to the mediated. However, Serbian photographers like Rista Marjanović knew that dry text might not be able to solidify memories of the war. Instead he was convinced that a more effective approach would be photographs grouped and displayed publicly in order to narrate Serbia s wartime experience and sacrifice.

7 7 Endotes 1 Error! Main Document Only.The Serbian photojournalist, Rista Marjanović( ) was the illustrations editor at the European edition of the New York Herald, and wrote about and documented the Balkan wars for the New York Herald and for L Illustration. He was granted excellent access to the battlefront by Dragutin Dimitrijević-Apis, chief of Serbian Intelligence in Marjanović returned to Serbia in Fall 1914 and was attached to the Serbian High Command as its photographer. From this vantage, Marjanvoic detailed in writing and pictures for the New York Herald and for L Illustration the story of Serbia at war. 2 Rista Marjanović to Press Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Predmet Piktorijalna Propaganda, 5 Novembra Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 66, Fascikle 631, Jedinica Marina Zeković Ratni slikari, fotografi amateri i dopisnici fotografi u srpskoj vojsci (Beograd: Vojni Muzej, 2001), 102. Also Jovan Obi an, Intervju profesora Pavlovića. Vreme, 24 Maj 1939, str Dora Apel, Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War, New German Critique, no. 76, Special Issue on Weimar Visual Culture, Winter 1999, Rista Marjanović to Press Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Predmet Piktorijalna Propaganda, 5 Novembra Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 66, Fascikle 631, 6 A notable exception was the valorization of the south Slav volunteers Serbs from abroad, Croats and Slovenes soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Army captured and released by Serbia s allies who were eventually assembled into a separate corps of the Serbian Army. 7 Antoinette M. White, All the Men are Fighting for Freedom, All the Women are Mourning their Men, Signs, 32:4 2007, p Error! Main Document Only.This point is significant because at this time in 1916 Prince Aleksandar had just initiated changes in the High Command for both political and other reasons. Field Marshal Putnik had been dismissed as head of the command and his deputy, Živko Pavlović, was also dismissed. Vojvoda Živojin Mišić was reassigned from his post as commander of the First Army and sent to France. Only in 1917 was he made head of the High Command. Andrej Mitrović suggests several reasons for this shake up. Firstly, the Prince felt that the officers in the supreme command had been keeping him the shadows. Secondly, the secret organization within the army, the Black Hand, and its leader Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, still had too much sway within the officer corps and Putnik and Pavlović, while not members, might have been too supportive. See Mitrović, Serbia s Great War, 162. Photographic displays and spreads in magazines and newspapers, especially in the Entente capitals, projected an authority and power which emanated from the two Karadjordjević s and did not belie the political infighting between civilian, dynastic, and military authorities. See David Mackenzie, Apis: The Congenial Conspirator. The life of Colonel Dragutin T. Dimitrijević(Columbia University Press, New York 1989). 9 Some of these men, such as Stjepan Uroić, ended up in the Ustaše. For a full discussion of veterans in Croatian society see, John Paul Newman, 10 Arguably someone like Stepjan Radić and others in the Croatian Peasant Party could lay claim to republican masculine virtues as these virtues were propagated from the French Revolution forward. Radić believed that Croatia within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes would depend on a new kind of citizen, devoted to civic duty and nation, and acting for the common

8 8 good. This point becomes quite significant during the interwar period as citizenship was symbolically tied to Serbian male sacrifice and valor fighting against the oppressive Austro- Hungarian state. Since most Croatian veterans were veterans of the Austro-Hungarian Army their wartime contributions were diminished by the valorization of the Serbian experience. Radić, who had not fought in the war due to his bad eyesight, believed that male citizenship had to rest on political virtue a devotion to nation and civic morality. However, some returning veterans to Croatia, many of whom had been POWs in Russia, returned to Croatia were critical of Radić's civic virtue and pacificism, calling for a more revolutionary response to Belgrade s hegemony. Some of these men, such as Stjepan Uroić, ended up in the Ustaše. For a discussion of these Croatian veterans see, John Paul Newman, 11 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 12 Error! Main Document Only.See Samuel R. Schwartz, Art, in Michael Flood, ed., International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities(London: Routledge, 2007), For a discussion of women s commemorative activities and how the Serbian state remembered women s role during the war, see Melissa Bokovoy, Error! Main Document Only. Kosovo Maidens: Serbian Women Commemorating the Wars of National Liberation, in Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds.), Women and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe, Indiana University Press, Pp and Gendering Grief: Lamenting and Photographing the Dead in Serbia, Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, Forthcoming Error! Main Document Only.The July 2 holiday to commemorate the Battle of Zborov became the main commemorative site of Czechoslovakia's heroic military cult during the interwar era for Czechs and Slovaks and was site of remembering Czech and Slovak war dead and excluded recognition of Czechoslovakia s German war dead. This commemorative site as well as others nourished feelings of difference and malice between the Czechs, Slovaks, and Czechoslovakia s German minority. See Nancy Wingfield, The Battle of Zborov and the Politics of Commemoration in Czechoslovakia, East European Politics and Societies, 17(Nov 2003): and chapter in this volume.