Description
Tuđmania — Poste restante is a series of letter from exile by Zvonko Tarle, a Croatian journalist who refused to betray Yugoslavia for the false promises of Tuđman’s nationalist regime. Written as open letters during the collapse of the Yugoslav ideal, the book is both an indictment and a poetic elegy — for a people who have taken a terrible path, for a homeland torn apart by myth and for a future lost to hatred.
“Croats cannot do without a master — and once they make a pact with him, they turn against him.” With devastating clarity, Tarle traces the roots of Croatian fascism to a hunger for sovereignty, a void in historical memory and the Catholic Church’s grip on the national soul. He condemns a war “in which Croatia attacked itself,” and asks what kind of state is left without a soul.
But this book is more than polemic — it is deeply human. Tarle mourns lost friends and destroyed cities, defends the honour of his profession, and insists: “We are not enemies of the Croatian people — not at all. We are enemies of Tuđman’s regime.” Through stories of mothers, children, journalists and partisans turned neo-Ustaše, he lays bare an entire society spiralling into fascist insanity.
“I remain like a part of the wind that does not care for borders,” he writes — a line that defines both his politics and his emotions. In Tuđmania, the soul of Yugoslavia speaks with rage, sorrow and unwavering clarity.
This 2025 edition includes a preface written for today, with the full hindsight of history, and states: “This book belongs to the future because the fate it describes was not sealed in 1992, but continues to unfold.” That fate — and the somewhat naive hope of undoing it — lives in these pages.