CHAPTER 2
LOVING ONE'S HOMELAND: CROATIA 1835
The state anthem of Croatia ‘Lijepa naša domovino’ (‘Our Beautiful Homeland’) is the oldest national song in Croatia. Its title, text and the manner of singing is defined by the Law on the Coat of Arms, Flag and Anthem of the Republic of Croatia and of the Flag and Sash of the President of the Republic of Croatia passed on 21 December 1990 by the three chambers of Sabor (Diet or Parliament) of the Republic of Croatia.1 On the following day, 22 December 1990, the Croatian Sabor passed the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, which in its article 11 states that the anthem of the Republic is ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’. Since Sabor issued Croatia's declaration of independence on 25 June 1991, the legalisation of the anthem preceded Croatia's proclamation of independence by more than six months.
In April 1990, in the first multi-party elections in post-1945 Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (CDU; in Croatian: Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) a populist centre-right party won the majority in all three chambers of the Sabor. In consequence, the CDU formed the first post-Communist government in Croatia and elected its leader Dr Franjo Tudjman the President of the Republic. In passing the above law, the party introduced for the first time, not ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ as the state anthem of Croatia, but the institution of the sash of the President of Croatia. The song first became the anthem of the Socialist Republic of Croatia as early as 1972, in the amendment I, article 4, to the Croatian Constitution (Blažević 1972: 45). In 1974, the new Croatian Constitution, incorporating the amendments, retained the same anthem.
The song thus became the official anthem under the rule of the Communist Party (the League of Communists) of Croatia while Croatia was a federal unit of the SFRY. As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 6, Slovenia and Macedonia also legalised their anthems while they were still federal units of the SFRY under the rule of their respective Communist parties. Their legalisation occurred in 1989 on the eve of the SFRY's dissolution, and can be regarded as part of the process of their secession or ‘disassociation’ from the Yugoslav federation.
The constitutional amendments of 1972 in Croatia resulted, in part, from the demands for economic reform and increased autonomy of Croatia advanced during the 1971 nationalist mass mobilisation campaign. Led by the Communist leaders of Croatia, the campaign initiated a period of public discussion on a wide variety of political and nationalist demands, which is often called ‘the Croatian Spring’. The Yugoslav president-for-life Tito ended the campaign (and the ‘Spring’) in late 1971 by removing these Croat Communist leaders from power (Goldstein 1999: 174–80). Apart from the constitutional amendments, this political campaign resulted in a significant decrease of the power and influence of the Serbs from Croatia over the Communist Party of Croatia and its government. One could argue that the Croats, as a nation, thus recovered control over their homeland. The official adoption of the anthem, which celebrates love for a Croat homeland, can be viewed as a symbolic expression and celebration of the renewed control of the Croats over their homeland. Be that as it may, the legalisation of the Croatian anthem in 1972 had no role to play Croatia's later process of ‘disassociation’ from the SFRY. This disassociation started in January 1990 with the walk-out of its Communist Party delegation from the congress of the Communist Party (League of Communists) of Yugoslavia and the subsequent disintegration of the Yugoslav Communist Party.
As we shall see below, since its initial publication as a song in 1862 ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ has contributed to the shaping of belief in the separateness of Croatia as a national homeland of the Croats and thus to the formation of a Croat national self-consciousness. But before we look at its history and origins, we shall first offer a brief account of the anthem as it is sung at the time of the writing.
Love for one's homeland and its borders
The title of the anthem is in the vocative case, ‘Lijepa naša domovino’; hence a better translation would perhaps be ‘Hail, Our Beautiful Homeland’. In this chapter we shall use the official translation ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’. The title also comprises the first line of the national anthem, which addresses the homeland and calls it ‘ours’ and ‘beautiful’. The first two stanzas continue in this mode of speech, addressing the homeland, listing a few of its attractive attributes, wishing her happiness, and telling her of the singers' consistent affection. While it is not unusual for an anthem to deal anthropomorphically with the national entity to which it is devoted, what is unusual is the shift in the nature of the address and likewise the shift in the party addressed. This is not the only feature that differentiates this anthem from many others.
The lyrics are reproduced here, as set by the 1990 law, but their official translation is modified to be closer to the Croat original.2
In the third stanza one sees the addressee is changed unexpectedly. Instead of the homeland, those apostrophised are the three rivers and the dark blue sea. These rivers are then advised to communicate to the world the Croat love of homeland. This revelation is contained in the last line of the third stanza and further elaborated through the fourth stanza.
Thus the third stanza for the first time identifies, albeit indirectly, the singers as Croats and the homeland as Croatia. The content, quality and duration of the central emotional attitude (love) is then contained in a series of descriptive statements in the fourth stanza. Apart from their locutionary role, these statements are almost certainly intended to have perlocutionary force to evoke or incite (Austin 1962: 109–19) love in the singers.
The principal theme of the anthem – the nation's adoration of the homeland – and the praise of the homeland, place the anthem in the category of self-congratulatory anthems. This is the same category to which the Czech anthem ‘Where is My Home?’ as well as the Australian anthem ‘Advance Australia Fair’ belong. The anthem contains no call to arms nor exhortation to fight. It refers to no rulers, nor does it pray for their safety. Thus it can be argued that ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ is a very pure example of a self-congratulatory anthem.
Out of the four stanzas of the anthem, the last three deal exclusively with the love that the Croats feel for their people and their homeland. As we shall see in the next section, this focus on just one theme was not the aim of the original poem published in 1836. Instead, the anthem's focus on love for the homeland is a result of the selection of the above four stanzas out of the original poem of 14 stanzas.
This lyric has a further feature that is relatively rare among anthems. This is the command to communicate love of homeland to the world beyond the borders. This is the song's second theme and an important second intention behind this song is to communicate the Croat love of homeland to the wider world. According to the anthem the communication is to be carried by the three named rivers and the unnamed dark blue sea. Why this communication has to be made to the world and exactly how are both left unclear. However, this mysterious command to water – to flow and tell the world of our love – does in fact communicate more than may at first appear. The first three lines of the stanza give us the geographical essentials that are here conveyed in a command mode. The command implies that three rivers Sava, Drava and Danube flow through the homeland and that the homeland is possessed of a littoral bounding the sea. While this would presumably be already known to those singing, others as audience would need to infer from the poem that these are geographical features of the Croatian homeland.
Naming and describing geographical features is a common anthem device for identifying the homeland and, indirectly, the singers as inhabitants and lovers of this homeland. The same device is used in the Montenegrin anthem (see Chapter 5) and also in the anthems of Slovakia and Hungary (in the full text). The latter two were written around the same time as the Croatian anthem in the early nineteenth century (Kiss 2002: 332). Moreover, at that time Slovakia and Hungary together with Croatia, all belonged to the one empire, Austria (later Austria-Hungary), under the rule of the Habsburgs.4
The naming of geographical features of the homeland in anthems has a specific political aim – demarcating a territory claimed, in this case by the putative nation-in-the-making, which had, at the time it was written, no nation state of its own. The anthem thus tells the world not only that the Croats love their people but also places their homeland within the boundaries set by the three rivers and the sea. So why assign to the anthem the task of demarcating the boundaries of the homeland? And why sing of the borders unless you want the borders to matter? The answer is that in singing about the borders you clearly want to distinguish your homeland from the state in which you are currently placed. We need only look to the previous two centuries of Croatian history, to distinguish at least two distinct reasons why this would be important.
The initial reason is to do with nation building. In Croatia's case, this would be the formation of a new nation from existing constituent parts. For most of the nineteenth century the Croatia of the Habsburg Empire did not constitute one political or administrative entity but rather three separate administrative units (Goldstein 1999: 54–8). Thus, at the time the song became a candidate for the national anthem of Croatia, singing about the rivers and the sea would have been understood, at least among the nationally conscious singers/listeners, as an expression of a desire to unite Croatia into one polity, demarcated by the three rivers and the Adriatic.
Once Croatia was united in one polity, singing of the three rivers and the sea would have changed its potential political signification. At this time it could then have signalled the desire to separate Croatia within these borders, at least as an object of Croats' love, from the new state. In 1918, Croatia became the homeland of the Croats within the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929) and after 1945, Croatia became a separate federal unit in the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The political implications of such a separation depends, of course, on the context of singing. At least on some occasions the singing of the anthem can be understood as signalling the desire for actual political separation from the overarching state. For example, the deputies of the Croatian Sabor and members of the public sang the anthem in unison upon the Sabor's proclamation of Croatia's secession from Austria-Hungary on 29 October 1918 (Tomašek 1990: 87).
On this reading, the rivers and the sea assume a function that goes beyond mere description of geographical features of a homeland. Singing about the rivers may be used to acknowledge or even to trigger a desire for political separation of Croatia. Love for Croatia and the gentle command to its rivers and the sea thus may, in suitable contexts, express the ultimate nationalist aspiration for an independent nation state.
Singing so long and so emphatically about one's love for one's people and homeland within particularly defined boundaries also has an additional function. This song suggests that the Croats love their homeland as it is bounded by the three rivers and the sea, that the so demarcated Croatia is the object of their unconditional and endless love. The implication is clear – love for the country so bounded will not allow them to see the homeland diminished or divided. Their love makes the homeland inviolable as a territory as demarcated in song.
The perlocutionary force of this anthem may also offer, inter alia, reassurance to the singers that the borders of the homeland are made inviolable by their love. By singing the song, the singers tell themselves and the listeners that their love makes the borders of their homeland secure. It reinforces the idea of the political efficacy of their love. It also sends a message to other-than-Croatian listeners that the unassailable power of the Croats' love of Croatia stands in the way of any who would tamper with the inviolable borders of the homeland.
Whether we regard ‘Lijepa naša domovino’ in a prophetic light or otherwise, Croatia's borders and its territory have indeed expanded and contracted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century until they assumed their present shape in 1946 under Communist rule, demarcated (in part) by the three rivers and the Adriatic.5 The last challenge to these borders was from the Serb inhabitants of Croatia in 1991. Following Croatia's secession from the SFRY in June 1991, the Serb minority, supported by the Milošević regime, several nationalist parties in Serbia and the remnants of the Yugoslav federal army in December 1991 attempted to secede from Croatia and establish the Republic of Serb Krajina, taking a third of Croatia's territory. Their armed rebellion was crushed, with US assistance, in 1995 and then most of them left Croatia en masse. Since then Croatia's borders have been uncontested (Goldstein 1999: 198–238).
Given the history of contestation, it is understandable that the national anthem should combine an expression of love for the homeland with a demarcation of the borders. The song thus tells an important, indeed crucial, story about Croatia and the Croats. The song reiterates that this love is of the patriotic kind and carries with it a concomitant readiness to sacrifice life that maintains Croatia's borders as they should be.
However, the poem from which the anthem was drawn, ‘The Croatian Homeland’, was not originally intended as a national anthem. Instead, it was a ‘national awakening’ (‘budilica’) poem. It was intended to awaken (‘buditi’) national sentiment and love for one's homeland among the Croats living at the time in a state many regarded as foreign. For example, the original text of the poem did not employ names of rivers as territory-demarcating devices, for the simple reason that the original poem was not attempting to demarcate the territory of the homeland. In fact, the original poem mentions only two rivers – Sava and Danube. Drava and the dark blue sea were added a few decades after the poem was first published.
From a national awakening song to the state anthem
The four stanzas of the current anthem were selected as the text of a song and set to music in the mid-nineteenth century. Vatroslav Liechtenneger, a teacher of singing at the Zagreb music school, noted down the melody in the early 1860s from his students' singing and published it in the second volume of his collection of choral music in 1862 (Tomašek 1990: 47–8). The song was published under its original title ‘Hrvatska domovina’ or ‘Croatian Homeland’ and the author of the lyrics was identified as Antun Mihanović. There was no mention of the composer. The oral tradition, passed on by the first Croatian musicologist, Franjo Kuhač, attributes the musical score to Josif Runjanin, a cadet in an Austrian regiment in Glina.6 According to this tradition and based on the reports and letters of Runjanin's family and friends, the music was composed in 1846, 11 years after the publication of the original poem (Tomašek1990: 30–5; Očak 1998: 345–50).
Whether the author of the musical score selected the four stanzas out of the 14 of the original poem we do not know. It is certain that the author of the poem, Antun Mihanović, did not make the selection. It is unlikely that he even knew the selection had been made or that his poem had been transformed into a song. In summary, we do not know who the ‘composer’ or ‘selector’ of the text of the anthem was, nor do we know the date when the selections were made.7
Antun Mihanović (1796–1861), was a Zagreb-born lawyer, an employee of the Austrian military and, later, civil service, and an ardent advocate for the use of his native Croatian language. When and where he wrote the poem is not known. The manuscript, now lost, was sent by Mihanović from Rijeka to Zagreb and published in the literary and cultural magazine Danitza Horvatska, Slavonska y Dalmatinska (the Croatian, Slavonian and Dalmatian Morning Star) on 14 March 1835. The same magazine, under a changed title, Danica Ilirska (the Illyrian Morning Star) published a Croat translation of Tomašik's ‘Hey, Slovaks [Slavs]’only two years later in 1837 (see Chapter 1). This magazine was edited by Ljudevit Gaj, the intellectual leader of the national awakening movement in Croatia, which was at the time a part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Habsburg Empire.
In order to refer to the national group or groups that the movement targeted Gaj used the term ‘Illyrian’. The name originally referred to the inhabitants of the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula before the Roman conquest of the region in 168 BCE. Gaj's ‘Illyrians’ were, of course, not the original Illyrians. Instead they were speakers of various South Slav dialects and languages that had not yet been either described or standardised, and included the inhabitants of today's Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria. Gaj advocated the standardisation of all these dialects on the basis of the single dialect –Štokavian – spoken by the majority of these populations. He then used the standardised language to create a vibrant literature and press (Despalatovic 1975: 79–95). In 1850, partly as a result of the Illyrian movement's advocacy, the leading men of letters and linguists from these areas signed an agreement in Vienna establishing a standardised language based on the dialect selected by Gaj.
In keeping with the Gaj's Illyrian programme, Mihanović's ‘Croatian Homeland’ was written in Štokavian using the alphabet conventions pioneered by Gaj, although Mihanović's native dialect – the Zagreb dialect – was Kajkavijan. In this respect, the poem is one of the pioneering literary works of the Illyrian movement. It was also a pioneering work in its aim to awaken the feelings of allegiance and love among literate Croatians (who were an Illyrian ‘tribe’) for their homeland. As the post-primary education offered to inhabitants of the Croatian lands was at the time in Hungarian or German, continuing education beyond the primary level called for cultural and linguistic assimilation to non-Croatian and non-Slavic cultures. By creating a literature and press in a widely understood Slavic language, the Illyrian movement aimed at preventing and resisting cultural assimilation as well as creating a large literate public of Croatian and Slavic speakers. As we shall see below, Mihanović's ‘Croatian Homeland’ fulfilled the aims of this programme admirably. It extolled the beauty of the homeland and the virtues of its inhabitants, while also emphatically asserting and evoking their love for their homeland. It also asked the outside world, including presumably other peoples and rulers in the Habsburg Empire, to recognise the everlasting love of the Croats for the territory that was theirs.
The poem asserts the distinctness of Croatia from other homelands in the Balkans and of Croats from other peoples in the Habsburg state. In the second stanza, the poem explicitly calls upon the Croats to recognise this as their only homeland:
Dear to us as you are the only one
However, in 1835, this was not a call for the political separation of Croatia from the Habsburg Empire. As a civil servant (soon to be appointed the Consul-General in Serbia) Mihanović maintained his allegiance to the state in whose service he had spent most of his life. Like most literate Croats at the time, he was a loyal subject of the Habsburg Emperor and King. Yet in this poem he enjoined Croats to recognise the virtues of the land of their birth and urged them to make Croatia their cultural homeland. In any case, Gaj's Illyrian programme of national awakening which Mihanović wholeheartedly advocated did not envisage an independent Croat nation state.
The Illyrian programme did envisage the creation of a common cultural and linguistic space for the South Slavs, at least the speakers or readers of the soon-to-be-standard Štokavian dialect. This common cultural space, where literature and exchange of information could flourish, is, in a sense, the common, cultural, homeland of the Štokavian speakers and readers. Perhaps in line with this idea, the ‘Croatian Homeland’ was also published in 1837 in the literary magazine Uranija in Beograd, the capital of the semi-independent principality of Serbia8 (as speakers of Štokavian, the Serbs were an Illyrian ‘tribe’). The title of the poem in that publication was changed. Instead of ‘Croatian’ the title became ‘Our – my – homeland’ (‘Naška – moja – domovina’). Although it was printed in Cyrillic, the alphabet in use in Serbia, little was changed in the text of poem: the poem was still clearly about Croatia and the Croats' love for their homeland. However, the change of the title and the use of the familiar form of ‘our’ (‘naška’) suggest that what the poem says about Croatia could also be said of other lands where the Štokavian dialect was understood or spoken. Presenting his accreditation letters in 1836 as the Austrian Consul-General, to the reigning Prince Miloš Obrenović of Serbia, Mihanović said in his native Croatian:
I am a Croat and I am happy and honoured to be appointed as the first consul of the Emperor and King to the heroic people in a glorious state whose blood, language and glory is very close to me and to our only prince of an Illyrian tribe.9 (Pavlović 1990: 118, italics added here)
This was probably the first public statement in Serbia of the vision of Illyrian solidarity and the publication of Mihanović's poem in Beograd, a year later, was probably intended to further promote this Illyrian vision.
Mihanović's poem, which differs in some respects from the official anthem, starts with the invocation of the positive attributes of the homeland and lists the reasons for ‘our’ affection.10
The first two stanzas list the reasons why the homeland is so dear to the ‘us’, those implied in the unison but who are not explicitly identified in the poem until its penultimate stanza. Only in the penultimate stanza of the poem (and also the anthem), do we learn that the person who feels the love or affection is a Croat. From this we can infer that ‘we’ are the Croats and have been since the beginning of the lyrics. The homeland is asserted to be different from any other country or land that may claim our allegiance as Croats. Yet the poem itself does not tell us how to identify the Croat homeland, how to distinguish or demarcate it from other lands. Either this demarcation from other lands is not important or perhaps, more likely, those who love this homeland can easily identify it without the need for the poem to do that for them. This is indeed what any patriot is supposed to do – they know, without having to be told, what their homeland is. The fact that the declaration of identity comes late in the lyrics, suggests an interesting covert complicity within the group of patriotic readers, who presumably from the outset know who they are and understand the lyrics in the light of a declaration of what is held in common.
The second stanza offers a vague description of the landscape (flat and mountainous) – a description that this homeland might indeed share with many others. The third and fourth stanzas offer an equally vague descriptions of the climate and physical features of the homeland, juxtaposed with the physical characteristics of the people.
One striking juxtaposition is that of the human countenance with fine wine.12 The function of all these endearing associations should be read in the light of an effort to illustrate how the people of the homeland find harmony with its physical landscape. This harmony is found in the analogous beauty of both the people and the landscape, as consistently and emphatically asserted in these stanzas.
From an observation of the beauty of bodies and the landscape, in the next two stanzas we move to the beauty of work.
Here the genre is clearly that of a paean to the tilling of land, to agricultural labour and its patriarchal distribution. It is worth noting that in these idyllic stanzas, no other type of work is mentioned. The only work unrelated to agriculture that Croat women perform is spinning and breastfeeding. And, as Zečević (1988: 19–20) has noted, in the poem only the women perform these two tasks simultaneously. The patriarchal conception of woman's work (work that always demands both hands to be employed) is thus, Zečević argues, well exemplified in this single line dedicated to women. From work, the next two stanzas move on to play.
Play consists of singing, playing the national instrument, and dancing the national dance – the kolo. Like work, play is an outdoor activity, taking place in nature and without mention of any dwelling or built surrounding. In Mihanović's homeland, it seems, work and play are all outdoors and thus activities that take place in a natural or rural setting. The only possible exception is that of breastfeeding and spinning which might imply a dwelling of some sort. Apart from this presumption in favour of homebound breastfeeding, the homeland appears to be bereft of any human habitation, let alone any towns or cities.
In summary, this is a highly selective view of work and play both in terms of both content and context. It perhaps suggests that Croats like to work and play in nature and that they are creatures of nature. The homeland presented may thus easily be read as a hypostatisation, and therefore it is the natural right of the Croats to occupy their territory. Naturalness should certainly be taken as implying the purity of the entity inspiring the devotion these lyrics seek to inspire.
Benedict Anderson writes of ‘the celibate vocabulary of all nationalisms and the taboos that lurk beneath it’:
For the mother (motherland) who makes claims on the lives of young males is the woman who gave them all birth and whom they all have in common: she is also, in a direct sense, the woman they cannot/must not have, even think of having, sexually. It is her complete inaccessibility that makes any ‘sibling competition’ unimaginable (Anderson 1999: 200).
Sibling competition is a convenient analogy for the kinds of conflict-in-prospect, the series of wars in twentieth century that erupted in Croatia and other South Slav lands among the members of various national groups (Gaj's Illyrian ‘tribes’). And indeed, the next topic dealt with in Mihanović's lyrics is that of war.
In the poem, war occupies as much space as labour and play put together: four stanzas. However, it is not clear whether, in Mihanović's view, war is as important or as time-consuming in the life of the Croats as labour and play put together. As was the case with the labour and play, the picture of war the poem gives is highly selective. There are only two scenes from the war: first, the call to arms and the arming and, second, the outcome of war, the freedom won and the enemy killed. The war sequence starts with a mysterious call from the borderlands of Croatia (where the river Una flows) begging for death. This stanza introduces the theme of freedom: the issue of the coming war is the freedom of the Croats. The sequence ends with a sad mother being told to be joyful because her children have fallen as heroes of the homeland. Warfare itself – the clash of arms and the battlefield strewn with the dead and dying – is absent from this account.
While avoiding any treatment of the clash of arms, the war sequence highlights two aspects of war – on the one hand, the fight for freedom, and on the other, the heroism and the courage that are part and parcel of such a struggle. Croats are portrayed as fighting for freedom and, in fighting and winning freedom, they are heroic. Equally heroic are no doubt the sad mothers capable through their faith in the homeland of transforming their grief into joy. The war sequence thus appears to have a single purpose: to show how heroic all the Croats are in their commitment to and their fight for freedom. This demonstrates how important the freedom of the homeland is for them. The winning of freedom through the ultimate sacrifice is yet another proof of the Croat's love of homeland, a topic immediately re-emphasised once war and freedom have been dealt with in the text.
In contrast to the first two stanzas of the poem, the last two do not deal with the reasons for, or the content of, the Croat's affection for his homeland. The first of these last two stanzas proclaims the Croat's love to the world and identifies the one who loves as Croatian. The proclamation is to be disseminated metaphorically by the two largest rivers that flow through Croatia to reach other lands and ultimately the sea (although the sea is not mentioned in the original poem). The last stanza describes the time-span or rather the timelessness of that love. The description is, however, both temporal and spatial because the mention of the sun-warmed fields, oaks and graves of the Croats offers us a spatial demarcation. The temporal aspect is defined both by natural and human phenomena – the sun, the storm, the graves and their dead, and the beating of the Croats' hearts. Love will thus last as long as the world of nature and humankind will last. The hypostatisation of Croat devotion to Croatia is thus enjoined at the last stanza through a sanctification delivered by way of reference not only to nature and its sublime manifestations, but also to the sanctity of those national subjects and heroes of the nation who are no longer with us. The love for homeland lives on longer beyond the lifespan of humanity reading the poem; presumably it extends beyond the lifespan of the very poem that proclaims it to the world.
From poem to anthem: The choice of the people?
We shall probably never know why the anonymous selector, ten or more years after the publication of the poem, chose the first two and the last two stanzas of the above 14 and put them to music. Whatever his motives (and it was very likely a he), this act of selection and music-setting launched the poem, in its song form, onto the path to anthemhood. However, we can surmise that he had at least two good reasons for his selection. First, these are the only four stanzas that describe affection and love for the homeland. Love is an eminently ‘sing-able’ emotion. Indeed, it is an emotion that has been expressed through song and music probably since the inception of human song. Love is thus a clearly preferable theme, particularly when compared with work, play or war (the three other themes of the original poem). A second reason is that identification with the emotion of love is easier than identification with the rural pursuits of work and play or even the poem's bloodless and metaphorical account of freedom fighting. It should also be noted that, under the influence of Croatian Romanticism, love for homeland had by then become a popular subject for poetry and patriotic lyrics were the dominant genre in Croatian literature of the period (Jelačić 1996: 106–14). The four stanzas selected would have provided a most suitable vehicle for the expression of this easily identifiable emotion.
As discussed above, love for one's homeland is also an anthem-quality emotion. National anthems and national songs should at the very least stir this emotion. And what better way of stirring an emotion than expressing it in the strongest terms and proclaiming it to be everlasting? Mihanović's four stanzas perform this role impeccably. Arguably, they do so better than the songs that were their competitors for the title of Croatian national anthem, songs such as Ljudevit Gaj's ‘Croatia Has Not Perished As Yet’ (‘Još Horvatska ni propala’, 1835) or Hugo Badalić's ‘Croatian Anthem’ (‘Hrvatska himna’, 1891) (Pavlović 135: 138).
Apart from these two songs, there were another two competitors for the title of the national anthem in the late 1880s: ‘We are Brothers, Illyrians’ (‘Mi smo braćo ilirskog’, 1840) by Mate Topalović and ‘God Long Live’ (‘Bože živi’, 1867) by Petar Preradović, the leading Croatian poet of Serb Orthodox origin (Tomašek 1990: 77). These four, as well as a few others, were popular national songs whose main function was celebratory. They were performed at popular gatherings, such as fairs, and at banquets celebrating historical events or anniversaries and birthdays of rulers or cultural entrepreneurs. On such occasions, these songs were competitors to ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ for the role of the principal national song.
During a large Croatian exhibition of artefacts in Zagreb in August and September 1891 (organised by the Association for Economy of Croatia and Slavonia) the principal candidates for national anthemhood, including a few of the above national songs as well as ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ were publicly performed and duly acclaimed. Both the public and the media appear to have preferred ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ to all the others and a few newspapers proclaimed ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ to be the national anthem of the Croatian people (Tomašek 1990: 79–85; Očak 1998: 351). Franjo Kuhač then argued that ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ was in effect proclaimed, by popular acclamation, to be the national anthem of Croatia at this very exhibition-fair (Tomašek 1990: 77).
In 1905, the Association of the Croat Singing Societies (Savez hrvatskih pjevačkih društava) decided to propose to the Croatian Sabor that ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ be officially proclaimed the Croatian anthem. The Diet never considered this proposal, but on 29 October 1918, having heard the official proposal to dissolve Croatia's ties with Austria-Hungary, the deputies and members of the public all stood up and sang ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ in unison, giving the anthem its first official performance and recognition as the national anthem (Tomašek 1990: 85–7).
In December 1918, following the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the first stanza of ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ became the second stanza of the composite state anthem of the kingdom. The first stanza of the Serbian royal anthem ‘God of Justice’ served as the first stanza of the composite anthem and its third stanza was the first stanza of the Slovene national song ‘Forward the Flag of Glory’ (in Slovenian). The composite anthem thus reflected the order of the nations or ‘tribes’ in the Kingdom: Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The anthem ended with the second stanza of ‘God of Justice’, praying for the safety of the king. In 1929, by royal proclamation, the three-named-kingdom changed its name to Yugoslavia.
After the creation of the Independent State of Croatia in April 1941, the pro-fascist Ustasha regime proclaimed ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’ Croatia's state anthem. Ustasha's principal adversary – the Communist-led Partisan movement in Croatia – also used the anthem as its own national song or unofficial anthem (Tomašek 1990: 89–90). This is similar to the situation in Slovenia during World War II when the same national song/anthem was used by both the resistance and the quisling authorities. It was then in 1972 that the song regained its official status as the anthem of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and has since held this status without interruption.
From a poem to the anthem: Selection, modification and addition
In the path to official anthemhood, the original lyrics of Mihanović's four stanzas have undergone several modifications which, arguably, have made it more suitable as an anthem. In the standard version of the song that the Association of Croat Singing Societies recognised in the late 1890s the world ‘honourable’ (first stanza, last line) was changed to ‘fortunate’ (sretna, in the current official translation or ‘blessed’) (Tomašek 1990: 68). Perhaps by the late nineteenth century, it was widely assumed that any homeland worth singing about would be honourable but that not every one need be fortunate. Perhaps the singers and the current authorities thought that if one were to wish a homeland to be honourable now, one might actually be suggesting that it has not been honourable in the past (a potentially blasphemous thought). To avoid any such implication, it may well have been safer to wish the homeland to be fortunate or blessed.
The second stanza did not undergo any alteration, but the third has undergone significant changes and additions. The original ‘Keep on flowing fast Sava’ became ‘Keep flowing Drava, keep flowing Sava’. Already in the first written version of the song in 1862, a new river-name was added, ‘Drava’, and the adjective ‘rapid’ was deleted (Tomašek 1990: 69). During the rule of the pro-fascist Ustasha regime in 1942, the third river name ‘Drina’ was added: the state of Croatia then included Bosnia and Herzegovina and its border with Serbia was marked by the river Drina. This addition was abandoned after 1945 in line with the shift of Croatia's borders within the Communist-ruled Yugoslav federation. In the third line, ‘wherever you whirr’ was also replaced by ‘dark blue sea’ (sinje more, translated in the official version as ‘deep blue sea’). In consequence the line, ‘Wherever you whirr, tell the world’ became in the anthem ‘Wide blue sea, tell the world’.
In the 1862 version, in the last line the word ‘home’ was replaced by ‘people’ (narod) (Tomašek 1990: 69).16 The word ‘narod’ later came to be translated as ‘nation’ but in the 1860s the word had not as yet become firmly associated with the modern concept of nation as a source of state sovereignty. Thus, the original ‘The Croat loves his home’ became ‘The Croat loves his people’.
These changes have modified the meaning of the original text in some obvious ways. The singers now wish the homeland to be fortunate while Mihanović wished it to be honourable. He wanted only two rivers to tell the world of the Croat's love while the anthem recruits another river and the dark blue sea to perform this task. Most importantly perhaps, the object of love has changed. In Mihanović's poem the Croat loves his home, that is, his homeland. His homeland is an idyllic place where people and landscape fit together; his love for his homeland, patria, is a love for the idyll of a simple but freedom-loving people working, playing and fighting in purely natural setting, uncontaminated by anything urban (and anything political). In the anthem, the Croat loves his people. The people, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were understood to be a nation, bounded by its ‘natural’ borders. Those natural borders marked a politically demarcated national territory, symbolising the unity of the Croat nation. If the love of one's idyllic patria equates to patriotism, the love of one's nation, grounded on a demarcated national territory, signifies nationalism. Has this change of the object of love transformed a patriotic poem into a nationalist anthem?
The changes also introduced a new reading of the original lyrics. The two rivers, Sava and Danube, were introduced in the poem as the messengers to the world of the Croat's love. Adding the third river and the sea to the anthem changes the role of these geographic features. These rivers and the sea demarcate most of the international borders of today's Croatia. In the anthem, the rivers and the sea are no longer merely messengers of love, and that role would appear to be the exclusive province of the sea. Rather, the rivers assume a new role, that of the demarcators of the borders of the homeland. In this way, the penultimate stanza becomes the focal point of the anthem – it demarcates the borders of the beautiful homeland and concomitantly proclaims the love of the Croat for his people who inhabit the territory within those borders.
What does the anthem tells us about the singers?
The anthem thus tells us more than the poem does. It tells us that the Croats love not only their homeland – which is beautiful, heroic and glorious – but that they love their people too. Moreover, it tells us where the borders of today's Croatia lie. The anthem thus becomes a text about a specific territory, demarcated by rivers and the sea, and about a specific people living in this land. All this helps the singers to identify more closely with the bond between the land and the people. The added specificity of the anthem assists self-recognition as well as identification of the singers and the object of their singing. Whoever joins with others to sing these words, makes common claim with regard to the identification of a particular people, the Croats, with a particular tract of land.
In brief, the anthem moves from addressing the homeland and proclaiming one's affection to addressing the rivers and sea and gently commanding them to impart information to the world about the Croats' love for their people. If we see the homeland as consisting of – inter alia – rivers, then we might say the rhetorical motion here is synecdoche (that is, an address to the whole shifts to become an address to the parts). Love may then be seen as directed to a nation as constituted by anthropomorphised entities of landscape: to love these familial rivers is to love the nation they comprise. We can thus see the nation is comprised of visually immediate elements (i.e. rivers and sea). This visual immediacy of an anthropomorphised landscape can be read as a common thread through the lyrics of ‘Lijepa naša domovino’.
Those who sing ‘Lijepa naša domovino’ tell the homeland first why they love her and then tell the blue sea (and perhaps the three rivers as well) that they in turn should tell the world that the singers love their people now and forever. Although the theme itself is certainly a staple among anthems, few national anthems are quite so singularly focused on love towards homeland and people. In addition, in this anthem, other staple themes of anthemhood are entirely missing: these typically including prayer or hope for victory or safety, description of the glorious past or radiant future, calls for unity and steadfastness in the struggle against current or potential enemies, or description of the superior qualities of those in unison.
A few of these staple themes are however hinted at. Firstly, at the very beginning the glorious and heroic past is suggested by application of the epithet ‘heroic’ to the homeland (‘fearless’, in the official translation) and by its denomination as ‘the grandfatherland of ancient glory’ (‘our fathers’ in the official translation). These attributes are assigned to the homeland and both the singers and the audience are assumed to understand the references to ancient glory and heroism. Secondly, the beauties of homeland are in the second stanza again hinted at, albeit in a non-specific way: the homeland is both flat and mountainous. The second line of the second stanza indicates that this homeland is the only one the singers have known thus highlighting the relationship between the singers and the land. Thirdly, the last stanza gives us further non-specific but also non-evaluative information about homeland – that the sun shines on its fields and the wind rustles its oaks. This immediate kind of place visualisation is among the most common of Romantic imagery found in anthems.
The singers' love is extrovert and focused on their homeland. There is no mention of any other possible object of love. Yet, in spite of focusing their love so exclusively, the singers do not want to keep their love to themselves, instead they want their love, great as it is, to be known to the world. Why is it that the Croatian people want to make their love so widely known and why choose the rivers as messengers? Perhaps the answer may be found in the connection between expressing love and defending its object: ‘The Croat loves his home …Whilst his live heart beats!’
As laudable and congratulatory as this may be, it is not very informative. The anthem does not tell us much about the singers, in spite of their alleged extrovertedness. After all, most anthem-singers are supposed to love the homeland of which they sing, even if they are not as emphatic as the Croats are in singing about it. Instead, the Croatian anthem reveals most about the homeland itself – where it is located and how beautiful it is. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Croatian anthem is the Croats' extrovert attitude to their love: few if any other anthem-singers command their rivers to spread to the world the message of their love.12