The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative

Abstract

The topic of this paper concerns the representations of the Zrinski-Frankopan (Zriny Frangipani) Conspiracy in five Croatian dramas, written and/or performed between 1900 and 2010, in the four different political constellations: in the late Habsburg Monarchy, in the early monarchist Yugoslavia, i.e. in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, in the Socialist Yugoslavia and finally in the modern independent Croatian state. The Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy is a sacrificial narrative par excellence in the Croatian culture as literary sources often directly refer the Conspiracy’s actors as martyrs. Therefore this constitutes an interesting subject for this thematic section. The basic methodological problem in this analysis is how to interpret a single literary text as a concretization of a historical myth which in itself represents a non-existent, intuitive, fluid construct. A critical reconstruction of a historical myth and/or a meta-narrative is an unrewarding, if not futile task, so it is therefore more fruitful to focus on its potential ruptures which undermine its semantic coherence. These ruptures can represent traumatic or at least uneasy loci in the historical meta-narratives, which makes them prone to interpretation.