by Daša Drndic
In the introductory text to the catalogue of that famous exhibition about Jews, “someone” explains that freedom must be realized through numerous seemingly insignificant acts, independence must be realized in all areas of national activity, what must be achieved is inner liberation, national purification, the strengthening of national consciousness, the permeation through all spiritual life of pure Croatdom, a new national state must be built, and to retain in one’s milieu the enemies of all nations, Jews, is the same as planting a young fruit tree with worms nesting in its roots. Visitors are benevolently instructed that The State Information and Propaganda Office undertakes to inform the Croatian nation of all the reasons that guided the Leader in the introduction of anti-Jewish laws and decrees and the carrying out of an anti-Jewish policy. Everyone must realize, it says in the catalogue, that despite their individual harmless appearance, Jews have never been, whether consciously or unconsciously, anything other than units of international Judaism, they have always been the enemies of everything that is expressly Croatian, that may assist Croats in attaining a better future. This exhibition, sponsored by the State Information and Propaganda Bureau in the city of Zagreb on May 1, 1942, is a contribution to the process of understanding Judaism and serves the anti-Jewish consciousness of the Croatian nation.
One important fact must not be overlooked, the anonymous agitator gloats throughout the catalogue: This exhibition was not created by employees of the State Information and Propaganda Office, it has been created by the entire Croatian people through their donations. Day after day, the Reporter on the Jewish Question received packages of books on the subject from citizens in the provinces. The people of Zagreb personally brought armfuls of books, data and documents about the evils the Jews have inflicted upon the Croatian people, experts from the universities have voluntarily placed at our disposal their knowledge and their time to organize this vast accumulated material . . . The exhibition contains just a few examples of Jewish bloodthirstiness from their earliest history on.
Finally, as a reward, all visitors to the exhibition “The Jews” are offered, free of charge, enjoyment of “the excellent films of German production, The Eternal Jew, Rothschild and Jud Süss,” which will be shown at the Danica picture house (now the ZKM theater) each day at three thirty p.m. and on Sundays at a matinee at eleven a.m.
The infamous film The Eternal Jew, made under the strict control of Joseph Goebbels (like the even more terrible Jud Süss), depicts Polish Jews who, living like rats, rule the world economy and commerce and threaten the racial “purity” of mankind.
To prepare the audience for a “quality emotional experience” during and after watching these appalling films, the Croatian newspapers teemed with “facts” and “authenticated statements,” such as those of the well-known socially active Ustasha, the carpenter and terrorist Vjekoslav Blaškov,§ who observes that at last an end has come to the Jewish abuse of thousands upon thousands of girls of Aryan blood who had been obliged to sacrifice their honor to obtain employment with Jews or in their companies. In Zagreb, Vjekoslav Blaškov bellows, in Zagreb there are innumerable Jewish companies in which Jews exploited not only the labor force, but also the honor and morality of their female workers, where Jews kept special female personnel for the whims of their sons. Most prostitution in Zagreb, bellows Vjekoslav Blaškov, has its origin in Jewish firms.
Not since the screening of Jud Süss, in the history of film, has there been a work that has succeeded to the same extent in inflaming the masses as that core cultural product of Goebbels’s anti-Jewish campaign. As soon as it was released, Jud Süss became a sensational hit throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Showing and watching the film became the main propaganda entertainment at “friendly evenings” for Hitler Youth, SS informers, concentration camp guards and other kulturträger, including the “ordinary, innocent” urban and rural masses. The audience went home from the screenings in a trance, overwhelmed by an emotional cocktail of patriotism and hatred, ready for official as well as small individual actions. At the 1941 Venice Film Festival, to the general enthusiasm of both audience and critics, Jud Süss (in which, by order of the SS, the extras were Jews collected from the Łódźghetto) won the Lion d’Or.
Veit Harlan, star of Third Reich propaganda films, is the only director to be charged twice for crimes against humanity, and ultimately released. Veit Harlan died in 1964, with divine forgiveness, a cleansed conscience and a smile on his lips.
Jud Süss is still banned in Germany. In Sweden, even at the beginning of 1941, the Nordisk Tonefilm company sought permission from the government to show it, but the request was turned down. So, in the course of the war, the film Jud Süss was not shown publicly, although the German Embassy in Stockholm organized a screening for selected guests.
The rights to the film Jud Süss are held by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, owned by the German state. The Foundation permits the film to be screened exclusively with advance explanation of the context and the times in which the film was made, as well as the influence that it was intended to have (and succeeded in having) on its audience. Nevertheless, in July 2008, the anti-Semitically charged brothers Sándor and Tibor Gede, devotees of Szalasi’s anti-Semitic Fascist Arrow Cross party, publishers of Hitler’s speeches, active associates of neo-Nazi web portals, organize, illegally, in the middle of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter, a public screening of the film Jud Süss. Five hundred delighted souls arrive outside a hall with one hundred seats, but the zealous Gede brothers reassure their loyal public that before September 13 there will be three additional screenings of the banned film Jud Süss in the same hall, there, in the middle of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter. You won’t regret it, exclaim the neo-Nazis Sándor and Tibor Gede. This magnificent film by the renowned director Veit Harlan, exclaim the Gede brothers, is a true work of art, and tickets are only 4 euros 50.
Two years later, on June 16, for the sake of continuity, for the sake of snatching it from oblivion, for the sake of the struggle with the greedy Jews who, in the twenty-first century, continue to shape the destiny of the careworn Hungarian people, the Gede brothers organize the screening of yet another propagandist artistic creation of the Third Reich — the film The Eternal Jew. There is delight in the hall. People applaud, laugh and shout, the atmosphere reaches fever pitch. Then the police arrive, arrests are made and the show is (temporarily) suspended.
After the war, Thomas Harlan, son of the Nazi “artist” Veit Harlan, is overwhelmed by his father’s past and goes to study philosophy in Paris. In Paris, Thomas Harlan works with Gilles Deleuze and Klaus Kinski, he participates in left-wing debates and in 1959 begins to rummage in the Third Reich archives, and thus becomes an obsessive searcher for the truth, a Nazi hunter, a revolutionary and lifelong critic of Veit Harlan, taking upon himself the unrepented and unrepentable sins of his father. What a burden.
And so, Thomas Harlan’s research lead to the prosecution of more than two thousand German war criminals.
Yes, one has to carry a burden like this to the end of one’s days. Responsibility for what my father did must pass to my children and my children’s children, and to their children, and so on. That past, which is also my past, circulates like shrapnel through my body, causes ineradicable, unbearable pain, and ravages it. That murky brown and black German past follows me through life.
As a child I was spoiled and cared for. On my birthdays the Gestapo would, on Goebbels’s orders, open Wertheim department store just for me in the middle of the night, the store was seized, of course, from the Jewish Wertheim family, so that I, “their dear Thomas,” could stroll undisturbed from floor to floor and choose my presents.
The NDH also enters the race. As early as April 23, 1941, in Zagreb, the Directorate for Film is founded at the State Secretariat for National Enlightenment, which on May 3 publishes a circular intended for all film companies and cinemas in the country:
From now on, the Independent St
ate of Croatia permits only serious and exemplary advertising which will, in a realistic way, emphasize the content and meaning of a film and even its message, insofar as it is favorable and beneficial and in the spirit of the new age . . .
When advertising their films, cinemas and film companies must take into account that in the Independent State of Croatia cinema is now placed at the service of the Croatian people and State and is no longer an ordinary business. Cinema must also give expression to the new spirit and new age, which will be increasingly felt each day in the world of cinema in the Independent State of Croatia.
The following year, 1942, the NDH opens the state company Croatia Film in Zagreb, under the auspices of which it makes and distributes cultural propaganda journals and short educational but significant documentary war films and occasional naive feature films with prominent Ustashas in leading and supporting roles, little films about the carefree Croatian Aryan Youth dancing and singing, then marching, and in the end killing; about splendid Croatian landscapes: about Croatian villages in which people live clean, authentic lives without electricity, drainage or water, but where sheep are raised and wool is spun and the sun shines over the renewed, enlarged and cleansed “independent” Croatian countryside and the state whose fighters selflessly lay down their lives on the altar of the homeland, or open and oversee concentration camps where people work cheerfully for the well-being of a bright future, which, five years later, deformed and defiled, ends up on a garbage heap, in sewage pipes which flow to this day and continue to emit their stagnant, putrid stench.
So, from 1942 to 1945, part of the Croatian cultural elite makes uplifting films about the voluntary spring cleaning of river banks and sea shores, and the winter clearing of piles of snow from the streets of Zagreb, newsreels about weavers, about the founding of the Croatian-German Society in Berlin — on a stage beneath unfurled red-and-black flags with swastikas and with Croatian-German friends, their arms raised, Heil!, ditties are recorded, little works about life in Bosnia, which is in fact part of the NDH, is it not?, audiences enjoy watching the Domobrans, the Croatian Home Guardsmen, taking the oath, also with one arm raised, Heil!, and documentaries about how clothes are made from rabbit fur, clothes later worn by lovely blonde “pure-blooded Croatian women,” short films about idyllic lives on the Adriatic coast (what was left of it), and about the Leader Pavelić’s visit to Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!, and about Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić,‖ that half-literate overseer of all the camps in the Independent State of Croatia, including Jasenovac, where he stops by to kill a few prisoners (the films do not show that) and to have his photograph taken with a dove on his chest, about that butcher with the rank of general (oh, how history repeats itself), that fugitive about whom, even today, bigoted émigrés and their descendants write sentimental, warmongering pamphlets; then there are films about the Croatian Parliament, renamed the Croatian State Parliament, then reverted again in 1991, just as in 1993 the NDH currency, the famous filthy Croatian kuna is resurrected. Then, there are films of the Leader’s speeches given here and there, exterior and interior shots, and so on, the people, rural and urban, are stubbornly fattened, strengthened, invigorated in their hatred of the Partisan bandits and those dreadful Allies who would like to deprive a magnificent people (the Croats) of their autonomy, of their hearth and tradition.
As early as 1942, at the Venice Film Festival, the NDH medium-length propaganda documentary Guard on the River Drina wins a little bronze medal, a great triumph for this puppet statelet dedicated to glorifying itself and Nazi Fascism, and in that year of 1942, when the main prizes, Copa Mussolini and Copa Volti, are awarded to the only director to be accused of crimes against humanity, Veit Harlan, and his wife, the actress Kristina Söderbaum, for the films Der Grosse König and Die Goldene Stadt.
Guard on the River Drina, that creation of sick minds, pregnant with dramatically packaged lies, talks about “non-Slav and un-Croatian nomadic tribes” which, straight after the declaration of the Independent State of Croatia, rise against the Ustasha authorities, and these bandits plunder and kill and carry out acts of bestial terror against the powerless population, but then the legendary Black Legion is formed, whose commander, after the death of Franetić,¶ is the semiliterate boor and butcher Rafael Boban,** who used to tour village fairs before the war, selling spangles and tobacco, and who disappeared from sight after the war, and so, like many SS members never taken to court and like his own fanatical émigré Ustasha brethren, remains for some a tender memory. And the Black Legion, under the command of Rafael Boban (the 9th Battalion of the Croatian Defense Forces was named after “Rafael the knight Boban,” as were the 1st battalion of the Croatian Defense Forces from Livno and a unit of the Croatian Defense Council in 1942), this Black Legion “demonstrates the greatest heroism, and the Croatian Liberation Forces (HOS) hurry to the aid of their brothers under attack in Bosnia” — as in 1992 — “and capture hordes of bandits who call themselves Partisans, rampaging without restraint . . . The Black Legion continues to cleanse the eastern border of Croatia” (Bosnia), the narrator continues in Guard on the River Drina, then “the captured bandits are taken to camps where they are set to useful work,” and, as the narrator puts it, displayed as “characters” — Partisans — “whom the Bolshevik infection has made more pathetic than animals . . . men who leave their own children to the mercy of hunger and death,” says the narrator, “while the Croatian State authorities take care of their placement into special reception centers, so after days of misery, hunger and suffering from all possible diseases, they are offered medical aid and assured a dignified human life,” in the care of gentle, smiling nuns.
What dignified human life, what special reception centers! I rescued children from the so-called children’s hospital in Stara Gradiška, from a camp under the command of Maks Luburić. With superhuman effort and the help of some nuns and friends, we saved thousands of children from certain death in other Ustasha camps and reception centers. There were terrible dilemmas, to take or not to take the children who could not even stand up and who would die in just a few hours, how to bear the pain of separating children from their mothers, and how to transport to Zagreb so many sick and starving nameless youngsters with their large intestines hanging from them and covered in flies, whose mothers had long since been sent to German camps.
Once, as we drove, I could not move in the wagon for fear of stepping on someone. The older children sat the whole time on potties, while the little ones soiled themselves. The floor was covered in mud and children’s worms. I endeavored as best I could to move the children to get them out of the filth. Toward morning, people at the stations came and saw this misery, and brought us water. During long stops, the healthy children got out of the wagon. For the weak ones in the last two wagons, there was no question of taking them out. I managed to get hold of a rake, so I could at least dispose of the worms. It seemed that before a child died the worms left its body, because, toward morning, when some of the children in my care became weaker, whole tangles of worms left their bodies. My name is Diana Budisavljević. I died in Innsbruck in 1978 at the age of eighty-eight. I kept a diary from 1941 to 1945. Today I am forgotten.
Then the camera in that pugnacious “documentary” film Guard on the River Drina shows children “whose parents had been killed by the Partisans,” all in faultlessly tailored and ironed little Ustasha uniforms, stepping out cheerfully, “their hearts full of contentment, on their faces a smile of happiness” as they dance the kolo in the burgeoning countryside. In the background, the beautiful, clear River Drina roars, in reality the bloody Drina in which the mutilated corpses of “the undesirable” float, the river that for centuries, to the present day, reverberates and rushes in an effort to cleanse itself of the blood of the innocent, and “order and peace reigns once again over Bosnian villages, for they are protected by the Ustasha guard.” The narrator tells how “the Croats of the Muslim faith, in whose veins runs pure Croatian blood, made huge sacrifice
s in the battle for liberation from the bandits,” and that now “their blood flows like a river, but life is returning, people are returning to their homes,” people are building, plowing, the masses are cheerful, they compete with one another, throwing rocks from their shoulders, in the background intoxicating popular music plays, the atmosphere is ebullient, Croatian Ustasha Youth come and help to establish Croatian life, the Leader comes, “cordially received, with the love of his grateful nation,” small children offer him bouquets of freshly picked wild flowers, little boys with neat haircuts and faultless partings, little girls with their hair drawn back into braids, in little white dresses and white crocheted knee socks, while he, the Leader, tenderly pats them on their little heads, “joyous tears flow,” one mother carrying a baby lifts its arm in a Nazi salute, throughout Bosnia the NDH flag flutters, this is the small film of big lies and monstrous ideology, awarded the bronze medal at the Fascist Festival in Venice in 1942, a little film which makes some people today, overwhelmed with nationalist resurgence, wonder why “in former Yugoslavia there was a ban on films from the NDH era.” This film was directed by Branko Marjanović, a key employee of the State Cinematic Company of Croatian Film during the Independent State of Croatia, head of newsreel and documentary production, and so on.
Andreas Ban no longer knows what to think. Who is that excellent director, Branko Marjanović, trained in Prague who, immediately after the war, as early as 1949, without any criticism from the Communist authorities, with no reference to his NDH patriotic film activity, with screenwriter Joža Horvat makes the socialist-realist propaganda film The Flag? A film in which a ballerina assures her colleagues that “a real artist takes inspiration for his art from life and this is the only way to create enduring and valuable works,” and then that ballerina, whose name is Marija, but everyone calls her Meri, saves the Partisan flag and sets out, enlightened, into the battle against fascism. What must Branko Marjanović do or not do, what must he agree or not agree to, for the new censors to approve of him making what somehow turned out to be Partisan films? Films about those same “bandits,” who are now heroes, brave, honest and just, but who in Marjanović’s film Guard on the River Drina plunder and murder and instigate unheard-of bestial terror against the powerless population, whom the “Bolshevik infection had transformed into animals who even abandon their own children to the mercy of hunger and death.” How can it be? One minute this, the next that? Andreas Ban searches, he searches for information about this Marjanović and finds many facts about his postwar career as a director, while Marjanović’s NDH artistic work is somehow bypassed, forgotten, like Walter Henisch’s SS photographic career. All right, the film Ciguli miguli that Marjanović makes in 1952, also with screenwriter Joža Horvat, is embargoed, but a mere four years later comes Marjanović’s fine, human, Partisan omnibus The Siege (script by Slavko Kolar, Zvonimir Berković and Nikola Tanhofer), in which wounded Partisans in a house that is surrounded talk about Zagreb’s illegal antifascist movement and their flight from the cruel NDH police, about love, about goodness and humanity. Then Branko Marjanović turns to directing documentaries, films about nature, about pure, authentic, liberating nature, untouched by human hand and the sick human mind, films about Istria, about the Karst, about the coast, about vultures and trout, weasels and foxes, about young bears and little fish, about the European dormouse, about glowworms, even about the coast of Africa, all small miracles of great nature, all excellent documentaries, praised and winning prizes everywhere, which reminds Andreas Ban somehow of Leni Riefenstahl’s biographical journey and her career.