Filip Erdeljac

By exploring how non-elites in Croatia during the interwar period, World War II and the immediate postwar years interpreted the national and political ideologies promoted by different movements, this project complicates our conventional understanding of the relationship between mass violence, collaboration and resistance in World War II Europe.  Peasants and workers in Yugoslavia participated in mass politics and political violence while often lacking a clear understanding of the political ideologies they claimed to represent.  My analysis of the politically and nationally incoherent behaviors that ordinary people frequently displayed provides new insights into the history of World War II Europe and reevaluates the unity of classifying people from the period as either fascists or anti-fascists, collaborators or resistors, communists or anti-communists, victim or perpetrators.