Trauma and Taboo: Forbidden Political Questions in Croatia
Trauma and Taboo: Forbidden Political Questions in Croatia

Summary/Abstract: This paper tries to differentiate cultural trauma from political taboo, as well as to show the manifestations of both in Croatia. By capturing the recent tendencies of political tabooization and de-tabooization of the main national identity signifiers, it is possible to discern several clear lines of collective relationships towards the country’s cultural traumas. First, the cultural victim trauma related to the Homeland War is sanctified and frozen. Furthermore, narratives built from that period have been increasingly applied to the Second World War, in order to represent the quisling Independent State of Croatia in a more positive light. Such attempts of making an ideological continuity are a clear falsification of history. Second, the cultural perpetrator trauma from both periods is denied and silenced. There have been several attempts to question both forms of cultural trauma in the fields of arts and civil society, but they are of limited reach and influence, especially because the mainstream media, political and religious actors promote the relativization and revision of the past. At the end of the paper, the author gives several pieces of advice for public action in order to change this mainstream condition of silencing and the tabooization of troubling traces from the past.

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