By Carla Stockton

Unterstadt is valuable, and not only because it memorably excavates a repressed episode in Croatian history. The novel also has considerable relevance, given the savagery besieging the innocent in today’s conflagrations.

Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Fraktura, 416 pages, $27.50. Published as part of the Growing Together project, co-financed by the European Union.

“You’ll learn a lot about Osijek,” Ellen Elias-Bursać promised when she sent me her translation of Croatian writer Ivana Šojat’s historical novel Unterstadt.

I envisioned a Croatian city not unlike Zagreb, a city with which I have a deep personal connection. I expected to encounter reassuring images: I would see my six-year-old mother skipping along ancient streets, I would meet fictional descendants of those she loved and was forced to leave. I hoped to come closer to the life and home she lost. Instead, I found myself experiencing anything but a nostalgic vision: Šojat’s powerful 2010 novel probes a cavernous nightmare few historians or journalists have entered.

1939, the year the Nazis brutalized Croatia, was traumatic for my family, who narrowly escaped the city’s  destruction. But what they left was a horror that was hardly spoken of or written about. Details of that time are still emerging. Šojat’s narrative, told through the lives of four generations of women, deals with the turmoil that came after the war, a violence that completely consumed the region, that ravaged what had been the achingly beautiful country my family had left behind.

Katarina, Unterstadt‘s protagonist, is approaching middle age. She has returned to her hometown in order to bury her mother. She knows little of her family’s history: her forebears were Richters and Steiners, families blended as much through happenstance as love.

Ethnic Germans, her family emigrated from Bavaria and Austria to settle in Croatia at a time that the province was rife with opportunity for citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Despite their birthright citizenship in Croatia., the Richters and Steiners were perceived by many as undesirable immigrants, unwelcome outsiders. This meant that they were forced to cleave to one another for community, for belonging. They spoke their new language — though their speech was infused with Germanisms. They inhabited a territory that was (at that time) not yet a country, grappling with a culture and society they were unable to fully understand or embrace. Locals tended to view them with suspicion; they were dismissed as interlopers, as hostile elitists. They were consigned to live with other outliers — in die Unterstadt, the lower city.

The story unfolds slowly and painfully as Katarina listens to the terrifying disclosures of her grandmother’s friend, Jozefina. After 1942, members of Osijek’s German community, including Katarina’s great-uncle Adolf, became enthusiastic Nazis. Young and old extolled Hitler’s virtues, encouraging the systematic extermination of Jews and others. Not all agreed with this turn towards barbarism; a number of German Croatians abhorred what was happening, astonished at the transformation. One woman observes that “Adolf’s father Rudolf was surely turning in his muddy grave at the sight of this son of his who was such a warmonger yet had never set foot in a trench.” Yet criticism from the German community could not mitigate the scorn aimed at Adolf’s family, which was compounded in the immediate postwar period.

As a Yugoslav schoolgirl, Katarina pledged to “. . . become a pioneer, to give my pioneer word of honor to study and work diligently. . . . to love my country . . . . to build a new life full of happiness and joy.”  She had no reason to doubt the idealism of the oath.  She had no way of knowing that as soon as Hitler was defeated, Tito’s communists – the Partisans, also known as the National Liberation Army — systematically hunted down and punished the Germans in Croatia, murdering more innocents than any who might have been guilty.  Instead of liberating their Nijemci (German) compatriots — reinstating political and moral sanity — the Partisans stole property and possessions, sending their owners to concentration camps or shooting them down in the streets. Thousands died; thousands never recovered what had been taken from them. All that the Richters and the Steiners had made was reduced to rubble.

Dramatically, Unterstadt moves on two tracks. Along with the larger catastrophe of the war and the postwar period, Katarina is dealing, unsuccessfully, with her own trauma and personal guilt. She returned partly to justify the bitterness she feels about what she perceives to be her mother’s cruelty. She longs to have her sense of victimhood reinforced by what she hears and sees. But Jozefina, whose own tribulations rival that of the Richters and the Steiners, offers Katarina a surprisingly new interpretation of the events that shaped her parents’ lives. Learning the truth of the past, in all its complexity, transforms the present.

Thus Šojat is out to do more than enlighten the reader about what has been an overlooked episode in the history of her country. Unterstadt probes a quandary regarding how we construct memory. Our knowledge of the past depends on witnesses, but their perspectives are inevitably narrow and self-interested. What can’t be questioned is the enormous suffering of everyday people amid conflagration — they are martyrs to causes they did not choose. Unterstadt‘s characters – its women and their men – are the collateral damage generated by incessant wars. The voices of the ‘lower city’ are the cries of those struggling to carry on in the midst of chaos.

Elias-Bursać’s lovely translation preserves some of the country’s distinctive linguistic flavoring.

“I don’t know what got into me, why I got up so early, even though my head was buzzing as if someone had inserted a hive of angry bees in my skull.”

“I jumped up as if a spring had sprung from my butt; I believe my heart nearly erupted out of my nose.”

“Alzo, Katarina, you look as if someone chewed you up with their dentures and spat you out!!”

Unterstadt is valuable, and not only because it memorably excavates a repressed episode in Croatian history. The novel also has considerable relevance, given the savagery besieging the innocent in today’s conflagrations.

Carla Stockton’s writing has been featured in publications such as Moment Magazine, The Toast, The Guardian, and others. Her translation of King Gordogan, by Croatian surrealist playwright Radovan Ivšić, has been staged in America and was featured in a broadcast on Trafika Europe Radio. With Bagel Fish Productions, she co-wrote and co-produced a number of screenplays and short films, including G-Spots?, a deconstruction of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale”. Her book Too Much of Nothing: Notes on Feminism, Womanhood, and Identity will be published in October by Mountain Ash Press.