Bošnjak’s monograph, published by Ljevak of Zagreb, details the lives and activities of Croatian writers in Germany, covering the period from the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia and the revival of Croatian independence to the country’s accession to the European Union.
Hrvatska književnost nastala u Njemačkoj 1990. – 2013. (“Croatian Literature Created in Germany from 1990–2013”) is a monograph by Milan Bošnjak, published by Ljevak of Zagreb, that details the lives and activities of ethnic Croatian writers in Germany, covering the period from the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, the revival of Croatian independence, and the country’s accession to the European Union.
Publisher Ljevak writes that Bošnjak analyses the lives and activities of writers of Croatian background in Germany from Croatian independence to its accession to the European Union.
In his analysis Bošnjak sets these writers into three main categories. The first are those that moved to Germany as political émigrés. The second group includes Croatian civil servants such as diplomats and teacher, and priests, whose primary professional functions include education, training, political and/or religious activities among the local ethnic Croatians. In his third group, the most heterogeneous, Bošnjak includes economic migrants and their descendants.
Among the political émigrés Bošnjak analyses the work of Malkica Dugeč, Vjenceslav Čižek, Ivan Ott, Gojko Borić, Jozo Mršić and Hrvoje Lorković.
Among the Croatian functionaries we find Jozo Župić, Adolf Polegubić, Acija Alfirević, Luka Marković, Miroslav Lovčanin and Mladen Lucić.
In his group of economic migrants Bošnjak numbers Irena Vrkljan, Dragutin Trumbetaš and the younger writers Marica Bodrožić, Nataša Dragnić, Jagoda Marinić and Marijana Dokoza. Bošnjak analyses their literary work through the prism of imagology, primarily focused on the place and role of the images of Croatia, Yugoslavia and Germany in the works of the authors of all three of Bošnjak’s categories.
Milan Bošnjak was born in Gospić in 1974. He holds a degree in philosophy and comparative literature from the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and a doctorate in Croatian studies. He is an employee of the State Office for Croats Abroad. His other works include Hrvatska nastava u inozemstvu (“Croatian Language Instruction Abroad”), the monograph Državni ured za Hrvate izvan Republike Hrvatske (“The State Office for Croats Abroad”), and the collections of poems Neuki letači (“Ignorant Flyers”) and Zelenoplavo (“Greenish-blue”). (Hina)