Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe, by Emily Greble

Abstract

Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler's Europe, by Emily Greble. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2012. xx, 276 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). During World War II, German occupation brought racial nationalism, genocide, and the decimation of traditional cultures to communities across Europe. In Yugoslavia, ethnic and national conflict were supposed to have been especially fierce because Nazi policy was compounded by the racial-nationalist policies of the Ustasha regime in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (comprising most of modern Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and because the civil war was raging among the Croatian Ustasha, the Serb nationalist Chetniks, and the Communist Partisans. In her new study of wartime Sarajevo, Emily Greble argues that local practice did not necessarily fit this narrative. Greble shows how war, occupation, and fascista buffeted the city, undermining traditional modes of life and fragmenting communities. But she makes the case that even when Sarajevan community leaders embraced German occupation and cooperated with Ustasha authorities, as leaders from both the Catholic and Muslim communities did, they did so as part of an ongoing effort to preserve aspects of the city's distinctive multicultural character. Therefore, civic and confessional belonging trumped nationality, face, or political ideology in the eyes of Sarajevan elites and their followers. Greble argues that analyzing responses to fascista and German occupation as either collaboration or resistance is misleading. Categorizing wartime behavior in such polar terms fails to explain why people made the choices they did. The communities that lived in Sarajevo between 1941 and 1945 responded to the war, to the Ustasha regime, and to German occupation according to ideas about local community. Thus Muslim and Catholic leaders initially welcomed the occupation as a chance to reclaim Sarajevo's political autonomy and regional status after losing ground to centralizing policies and Serbian influence in interwar Yugoslavia. But accepting the new Croatian state did not mean accepting the ideological agenda driving it. Although many Sarajevans embraced some of the regime's categories of exclusion, dividing the population into Aryans and non-Aryans, they did so on their own terms, sometimes shaping Ustasha and German policy in the process. For example, Sarajevo's elites continued to treat confessional and national identity as elective cultural affinities rather than biological fact. They helped numerous Jews convert to Christianity and Islam in 1941, and they convinced the Ustasha to classify Muslim Roma as Aryan by virtue of their faith. Greble shows that such cooperation was far from an endorsement of Ustashsa nationalist ideology. And it did not last. Sarajevans who cooperated with the Ustasha in 1941-42 had largely turned against them by 1944-45. Muslim and Catholic leaders learned that the national expectations of the new regime were incompatible with local values. Muslims also found that although the Ustasha formally classified them as Aryan Croats, they were still subject to discrimination and made vulnerable by the many-sided conflict of the war in Bosnia. …