By Zlatko Kramarić*|ARGUMENTUM
(This text explores Jasenovac as a paradigmatic expression of the “dark derivative of the European spirit” – the fusion of modernity and barbarism – in dialogue with Habermas and Derrida, and in the context of the author’s works dedicated to the culture of remembrance and post-Yugoslav identity.)
The concentration camp, as a metaphor for 20th-century Europe, represents the ultimate point at which the Enlightenment project transforms into a mechanism of exclusion and annihilation. In this sense, Jasenovac is not an exception, but rather a symptom of the European dialectic of reason and violence. Relying on Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality and Derrida’s concept of “ashes” and “spectres”, the text examines the camp as a moral challenge to European identity and the possibility of renewing that identity from the traces of its own defeats.
1. The Dark Derivatives of the European Spirit
In the history of 20th-century Europe, the camp became a symbol of its internal downfall – the point at which rationality ceases to be a means of freedom and turns into an instrument of violence.
In my books The Yugoslav Idea in the Context of Postcolonial Critique, Nostalgia – A Short History of Forgetting and Culture and Trauma. A Letter to a Bulgarian Friend, I have sought to show how the idea of Europe in the Yugoslav experience carried ambivalent meanings: emancipation and disciplining, universality and control.
Jasenovac belongs precisely to this duality. It is not a “Balkan aberration”, but a European consequence – a camp where the ideal of order turned into a perfect mechanism of destruction.
Habermas would describe this as the moment of collapse of communicative rationality: a space where dialogue disappears and reason becomes the administrative apparatus of death. The camp, in this sense, is not disorder but excess order — the rationalisation of evil in the name of (criminal) efficiency. And not only that: the very existence of camps within a society (German, Croatian…) constitutes a profound incision in the identity of such societies. “After Auschwitz, we can draw our national self-awareness only from the better traditions of our history, and these traditions should not be adopted unreflectively but critically. The national life context, which once enabled an incomparable richness of the substance of human coexistence, can henceforth be built only in the light of those traditions (in the case of the ‘Croatian question’, these are certainly not the traditions of either of the two totalitarian regimes, neither those dominant during the Second World War nor those linked to the other totalitarianism, the Yugoslav variant of Stalinism/Bolshevism – author’s note, Z.K.), that can withstand the fearful gaze — the gaze of one educated by moral catastrophes” (J. Habermas).
2. Archives of Ashes and Selective Memories
In Nostalgia – A Short History of Forgetting, I analysed the formation of “nations of memory” in post-Yugoslav societies. Memory is not grounded in empathy, but in competition over victimhood.
Jasenovac has thus become a field of conflicting remembrance, where the European idea reappears in its worst form – as a hierarchy of traumas and a competition for moral superiority.
Derrida’s reflections on “ashes” and “the spectres of Europe” help us understand that what was destroyed has not truly disappeared. Ash is a trace, not an absence: it demands that we assign it meaning.
From this perspective, Europe is a continent of ashes – a space where memory has yet to become dialogue and instead remains hostage to national archives, investigated either superficially or selectively. Astonishingly, even after 80 years since the end of the Second World War, we still do not know even an approximate number of those killed in Jasenovac. The wide range in estimations is deeply offensive — first and foremost to the victims. Just as any excessive inflation of numbers is a sin against every lost life, so too is any minimisation equally grave.
3. New Identities, New Tradition
In And After Tito – Tito, I sought to show how new identities in the post-Yugoslav space were constructed upon the ruins of a major political and cultural project.
These identities are born from ashes – but not necessarily as reconstruction; often they emerge as acts of revision and closure.
However, if we follow Derrida’s intuition that ashes may serve as the foundation of a new beginning, then remembrance of the camp can become the basis of an ethical identity, rather than a tool of ideological manipulation in which both the “left” and the “right” participate with equal fervour. Both should recognise that what they engage in is not poor historiography, but not historiography at all. Their superficial and sloppy actions are nothing but outbursts of hatred (R. Eaglestone).
Habermas’s concept of postconventional identity offers the possibility of European renewal: a form of community no longer based on myth or nation, but on an awareness of responsibility and fragility.
4. The Camp as a Moral Challenge to Europe
The camps of the 20th century – from Auschwitz to Jasenovac, from Goli Otok to Srebrenica – do not belong to the margins but to the very core of European history.
They remind us that modernity always carries within itself the potential for self-destruction. Therefore, the camp is not “outside” Europe, but its internal dialectic: the product of rationality devoid of ethics.
The memory of Jasenovac must thus transcend national frameworks. It must become European remembrance in the truest sense — not institutional, but moral and existential.
Only as such can it contribute to shaping a new Croatian and European identity unafraid of its own shadows.
5. Conclusion: Reading the Ashes
Europe may rediscover its spirit only once it learns to read its own ashes. Those ashes — of Jasenovac, Auschwitz, Vukovar, Sarajevo — do not belong to the past, but to our present.
If from them we learn humility and solidarity, then the idea of Europe will regain meaning: no longer as a triumph of reason, but as an awareness of human fragility and responsibility towards the Other.
References
J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I–II, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984–1987.
J. Habermas, Die postnationale Konstellation, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998.
J. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée, 1993.
Z. Kramarić, Jugoslavenska ideja i njezini neprijatelji, Zagreb: HSN, 2018.
Z. Kramarić, Kultura i trauma, Zagreb: Meandarmedia, 2021.
Z. Kramarić, Nostalgija – kratka povijest zaborava, Zagreb: Meandarmedia, 2016.
Z. Kramarić, I poslije Tita – Tito, Zagreb: HSN, 2024.
R. Eaglestone, Postmodernizam i poricanje holokausta, Naklada Jesenski & Turk, Zagreb, 2001.
*Zlatko Kramarić is a Croatian publicist, author, and diplomat, currently serving as Ambassador to Albania. Formerly a university professor and politician, he is known for his work in literature, cultural studies, and regional history.
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