Sources?
Please don’t trust me. I’m no expert and haven’t studied any of this in sufficient detail even as an amateur. I’m into history for two main reasons – as an anthropologist, to understand social processes; and as someone living in interesting times, to preserve my sanity and integrity as I navigate them. The kind of understanding that meets these aims prioritizes range to depth.
Fitzroy Maclean’s memoir, Eastern Approaches, is an excellent read, and as good of an entry point for the English-language reader as any I’m aware of. For delving deeper, all the Wikipedia articles I’ve linked to have references one can look up. For people who understand Serbian/Croatian, I can also recommend two documentary series: Yugoslavia at War 1941-1945 (Serb-centric slant, balanced by comprehensive research), and Tito – the Last Witnesses of the Testament (pro-Tito slant, balanced by the immediacy and detail of the personal testimony of people who knew him).
The former documentary series is closely based on the work by Branko Petranović, a Serbian historian who published multiple books on the history of Yugoslavia. His History of Yugoslavia, Vol. 2, People’s Liberation War and Revolution (in Serbian), is accessible publicly. For a different focus, Ivo Goldstein, a Croatian Jewish historian, published on what took place specifically in Croatia. His Croatia: A History and Holocaust in Croatia (coauthored with his father Slavko) have been translated into English. The father-son team also wrote a biography of Tito that hasn’t been translated.
Again, don’t trust me. Apart from Eastern Approaches, which I’ve read in full, I’ve barely skimmed these books. They seem a good start because, from the excerpts and reviews I’ve read, and from how much they annoy extremists pushing simplified myths of all stripes, they strike me as sources that put research ahead of their ideological biases – which will always be there.
I’m sure there are excellent books by Western authors too, but I’m less familar with what’s been written about WW2 than, say, the post-Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, and most stuff out there is kind of touch and go. That is, a lot of Western writing I’ve encountered on Yugoslavia, on any topic or period, has significant cultural blind spots, some apparent, others not that obvious to Western readers but so out of touch as to amount to misinformation.
To the point, you’d think that learning about 1930s Yugoslavia would be good background reading for understanding WW2, and you’d be right. Then, English-language readers often pick up a famous travel book by Rebecca West on that very topic. However, I won’t advertise it by sharing the title, as from what I’ve seen, the book cycles through portrayals of peoples of Yugoslavia as these strange and exotic creatures – so frankly, much of it is Anglocentric racist drivel, and my heartfelt advice is to stay faaaar away. My go-to choice in this department is Louis Adamic’s The Native’s Return, which I’ve read in full; Adamic was enough of an insider to understand the people he was writing about, and enough of an outsider to express it in language accessible to US readers.
So anyway, if this is anyone’s interest, by all means delve in, please be cautious what you pick up, seek input from multiple perspectives, and feel free to reach out if you think my 2 cents would be helpful. If I remember or run across any more sources, I’ll post them below.
Over and out, for this thread.