Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler's Europe.

• Author: Zaim, Elif
• Position: Book review

Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler's Europe

By Emily Greble

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 211, 276 pages, $35.00, ISBN: 9780801449215.

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Emily Greble's Sarajevo, 1942-1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitlers Europe is an elaborately detailed portrayal of Sarajevans' wartime experience. As a unique city with a multi-confessional character, the book seeks to understand how this "idyll survived the calamities that overwhelmed Europe in 1940s" (p. 2). In pursuit of this aim, Greble explores the responses taken by different communities, be it Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, or Catholic Croats, towards the multi-layered challenges of the occupation crisis and the changes came about as a result.

Greble divides her elegantly written work into seven chapters. Following a chronological order, the book starts in 1941 before the invasion of the city by the ultranationalist Ustasha Croats, and ends with Sarajevo's inclusion into Tito's Yugoslavia in 1945. Throughout the book Greble questions how the contradictory loyalties of Sarajevans' to their state, nation, community and city affected their decision-making processes and actions.

In the first chapter, Greble presents portraits of local community leaders from each confession. Admitting that none of the leaders are representatives of an entire community, she takes them as examples to highlight each groups' dilemmas, concerns and future projections. She also points out the frictions within confessional communities, referring to the power struggles resulting from desires to assert divergent agendas. Therefore, Greble not only shows the disputes amongst the groups and their reactions towards each other, she also speaks vividly of internal tensions. Interestingly, through these portraits, she also indicates the sense of local solidarity or, in Greble's words, 'civic consciousness' amongst the city members. In fact, through the book the reader sees that due to their many common features, from history to customs, "Sarajevans shared more with each other than with political outsiders" (p. 40).

In the second chapter, Greble analyzes the early months of occupation. She suggests that while the Sarajevan Catholic Croats and Muslims may have welcomed the formation of the new state, they soon realized that "the local understanding of autonomy was in fundamental discord with the Ustasha and German programs" (p. 56). Moreover, she discusses the differing...