Croatian Family Quotes

The sieges of Gvozdansko, Croatia and Alamo, U.S. tell the true stories of small bands of heroes who stood against massive armies to defend their homelands. They echo innate human devotion to the idea of fighting for freedom across the world. Alamo was designate by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2015. Gvozdansko deserves more research and the same level of respect and protection for its equal relevance. The Croatian landmark was the site of the pivotal 103-day Battle of Gvozdansko in 1578 against the Ottoman army. Among those who fought and died there were the common miners together with their families.

Modern visitors were often surprised to learn that the names and ages of the children were changed, three children were deleted from the story, and that “Edelweiss” was not a traditional Austrian folk song but was written by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1959. Those who consulted a map would ask how landlocked Austria had a navy and learn that the real-life Georg von Trapp had been a World War I submarine captain in the navy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which controlled the port city Trieste (now part of Italy) and the Slovenian and Croatian coasts. Tourists would also learn that escaping Nazi-dominated Austria by hiking to Switzerland is not an option, as the border is roughly two hundred miles away. In fact, locals chuckled at the film’s closing scene, as the family is depicted hiking in the direction toward Germany and the Kehlsteinhaus, known to Americans and the British as Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest.

It was right during the period when Karadžić was the most vocal champion of absolute separation along “cultural border-lines” that I happened to thumb through the 1991/92 Sarajevo phonebook. Under the family name Karadžić, I found twenty-one entries. In addition to the aforementioned poet, the rest of the entries could be fit under the following ethnic rubrics: 10 Muslims, 9 Serbs and 1 Croat. The most curious aspect of these lisings is the fact that the only Croat, Mate Karadžić, carried the same first name as the leader of the Croatian nationalist party, Mate Boban. And amongst the Muslims, I found Ale Karadžić, Ale being a term of endearment for Alija, the first name of the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović.

From July 1959 onward, the screening of mixed families involved proving the German partner—regardless of gender—had been the primary source of cultural influence in the family. In several documented cases, mixed families were not accepted into West Germany because the German Volkstum of the one partner had not been found to be dominant. In practice, this was assessed by checking whether the family spoke German at home or used another language, usually Serbo-Croatian or Hungarian

For example, in 1965, the family of Josef K.—who, according to the BVA, was an ethnic German born in 1927 to two German parents—was not granted an entry visa because his non-German wife, Djurdja, did not speak any German and the children had “typically Slavic first names.”37 The fact that past applicants from their hometown Sokolovac in Croatia had had a good knowledge of the German language was held against this candidate. In a similar case in 1964, Emil S. and his wife, Jelka, from Slavonian Vukovar were denied entry despite the “typically German” first names of their three children—Josef, Emmerich, and Karl—because Jelka’s Croatian Volkstum was judged to be dominant in the family.38 In contrast, Stefan V., a Hungarian German man from Czerwenka (Crvenka) in Serbia was accepted, even though he had his father’s typically Hungarian surname and was registered as Hungarian in his Yugoslav identification. His son Tibor bore an equally Hungarian first name. Yet Stefan and his children spoke excellent German and, according to the embassy in Belgrade, “made a very good impression.” Therefore, their application was granted without hesitation.39

Contrary to the idea that anyone with even remotely German descent would be recognized as ethnically German, German ancestry at times counted for very little compared with language skills in the family. This can be seen in the case of Barbara and Marko K. from Komletinci in Croatian Syrmia. Their first application, filed in 1963, to relocate to West Germany with their four sons was rejected even though both partners had German mothers and Barbara even spoke German quite well. Over a year after the family had filed their application for the second time in 1968, they received a letter from the BVA explaining that they were in fact not German Volkszugehörige, because this required a Bekenntnis. And the “most reliable evidence” for this Bekenntnis—according to the BVA—was the use of the German language in the family. Since the consulate in Zagreb had revealed that the family spoke Croatian at home, they had to be considered ethnically Croatian and were therefore denied permission to immigrate.40 This outright identification of language and Bekenntnis, which was not covered by section 6 of the BVFG, had become common administrative practice for Germans from Yugoslavia. In the overall system of co-ethnic immigration to the FRG, it was not until the large-scale Russian German immigration of the 1990s that language skills obtained such an important status.

I looked around their small, modest, unfinished home, filled with other people’s ragtag, twenty-year-old furniture. Zorica’s Croatian house had been taken from her; her family had also been persecuted for their ethnicity. She’d battled cancer. Milos didn’t want to fight in the war. He was driving a cab to keep this roof over their heads. They were victims too. •