Magnum Crimen

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Magnum crimen , secondary title: Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj (The Great Crime: Half a Century of Clericalism in Croatia ) is a book by the former Roman Catholic priest and Yugoslav historian Viktor Novak that was first published in Croatian in Zagreb in 1948 .

It is one of the publications in communist Yugoslavia dealing with the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and is intended to document the “betrayal”, “collaboration” and “crimes” of the Croatian fascist Ustaše movement. In connection with the communist post-war trials against Ustaše functionaries and their "accomplices", especially from the ranks of the Catholic clergy , it is mostly based on documents from the archives of the Yugoslav state "State Commission for Research into the Crimes of the Occupying Powers and their Aides" as well as to press reports from the Ustasha and the Church. The book is said to have been commissioned by the communist rulers to support the show trials they carried out and documents the atrocities of the Ustaše in detail. The book shows a communist-propagandistic and anti-Catholic tendency, but is still considered one of the most important works of Yugoslav historiography on this topic.

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In the book, the author Viktor Novak deals with the role of the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia from the end of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War . The main topic of discussion is its involvement in the crimes that were committed by the clerical fascist Ustaše during the time of the Independent State of Croatia and their prerequisites.

history

The first edition appeared as a large-format brochure , with 1119 pages on thin printing paper . For reasons that have not yet been clarified, possibly due to the small edition of only 4000 copies, the first edition is a bibliographical rarity.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church put the book shortly after its release on it (1965/66 abgeschafftes) "List of Prohibited Books" . She banned the author from church .

In 1960, a second abridged edition appeared in the series Društvo i religija (Society and Religion) published by Svjetlost in Sarajevo under the title Velika optužba , which was translated into Croatian .

It was not until the third edition, which was published in 1986 by Nova Knjiga in Belgrade, probably against the background of the worsening nationality conflict within Yugoslavia, that more attention was paid to the general public. The demand of the Roman Catholic weekly newspaper Glas Koncila , instead of an unchecked reprint of the work, to provide the new edition with its own source edition , was ignored.

In 2011 the fourth edition was published, in two volumes, with a limited edition of 1500 copies in English.

expenditure

  • Magnum crimen: pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj . Nakladni zavod Hrvatske, Zagreb 1948.
  • Velika optužba (Magnum crimen): pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj . 2nd shortened edition. Svjetlost, Sarajevo 1960.
  • Magnum crimen: pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj . Nova knjiga, Belgrade 1986 ( reprint of the first edition).
  • Magnum Crimen: pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj . Nova knjiga, Beograd 1989.
  • Magnum Crimen: Half a Century of Clericalism in Croatia . 2 vols. Gambit, Jagodina 2011.

literature

  • Oscar Neumann: Magnum Crimen: Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj . In: Journal of Central European Affairs . Vol. 10. Boulder, CO 1950, pp. 63-65 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ladislaus Hory, Martin Broszat: The Croatian Ustascha State 1941–1945 (=  series of the quarterly books for contemporary history ). 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1965, p. 10 .
  2. ^ John Neubauer: 1945 . In: Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer (Ed.): History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe: junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries . tape 1 . John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2004, ISBN 90-272-3452-3 , Short-term memory: Contemplating the ruins, p. 164 ( online [accessed March 26, 2013]).
  3. ↑ Klaus Buchenau: Orthodoxy and Catholicism in Yugoslavia 1945–1991: a Serbian-Croatian comparison (=  Volume 40 of the Balkanological Publications of the Eastern European Institute of the Free University of Berlin ). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-447-04847-6 , p. 411 .
  4. ↑ a b Dissertation - Tomislav Vujeva: Collaboration or Limited Loyalty? The historiographical discussion about Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb and the Catholic clergy in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ; University of Vienna, April 2009, p. 9.
  5. ↑ Srećko M. Džaja: The Political Reality of Yugoslavism (1918–1991): with special consideration of Bosnia-Herzegovina (=  Volume 37 of the Studies on Contemporary Studies in Southeast Europe ). Oldenbourg Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-486-56659-8 , pp. 47 .
  6. ↑ Ladislaus Hory, Martin Broszat: The Croatian Ustascha State 1941–1945 (=  series of the quarterly books for contemporary history ). 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1965, p. 10 .
  7. ↑ Viktor Novak: Magnum crimen: Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj . Nakladni zavod Hrvatske, Zagreb 1948, p. 1124 (unnumbered) .
  8. ↑ WorldCat: Velika optužba (Magnum crimen): pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj. Retrieved June 29, 2012 .
  9. ↑ Comment: Oružje iz ropotarnice [weapons from the junk room] . In: Glas Koncila . March 23, 1986, p. 2 .