Shards of broken glass: Daša Drndic's archival poetics

Abstract

This paper examines Daša Drndic's April in Berlin (April u Berlinu, 2007), alongside the author's other Holocaust novels, as a literary response to historical revisionism and outright denialism of the Holocaust in Croatia, which had entered the political and cultural mainstream during the War of Independence (1991-1995) and has persisted into the post-war period. Since the historical legacy of NDH in Croatia has been de-traumatized, it no longer represents a crisis of historical consciousness, which would entail a confrontation with the violent past as well as a painful transformation of national identity and the political space in which this identity is articulated. In contrast to this de-traumatization, as an ethnocentric strategy that normalizes the nation's fascist crimes, Drndic's novels stage a shocking confrontation with the shards of the violent past. Through both their innovative graphic layout and interdiscursive textuality - which combines historiographical narration with fictional devices, words with images- Drndic's novels function as archives-monuments intended to disturb, disrupt, and jolt the reader into awareness of history, laying bare the ideological mechanisms of control and bringing the bodies of the victims to our doorsteps.