How the Croatian Elites Switched over from the Habsburg Empire to the South Slav Kingdom in a Drunken Night in November 1918

Abstract

Abstract In his slightly fictionalized autobiographical essay A Drunken November Night 1918 (written in 1942, first published in 1952), Miroslav Krleža attempts to reconstruct a scandal to whose creation he himself contributed to a large extent. In November 1918, in the interregnum from the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy to the foundation of the South Slav kingdom, the then young author felt compelled at a reception held in Zagreb in honor of the Serbian officers to protest loudly against the speech of the former high Habsburg officer Slavko Kvaternik. The scandal retrospectively reinforced Krleža's conviction of the misery of the contemporary Croatian elite, a circumstance whose reasons, in his opinion, lay not only in political opportunism and moral corruption, but also in unreflected utopianism and the underlying political naivety. His hope that after the dissolution of the compromised Habsburg rule the South Slav peoples could advance towards national and social emancipation was soon replaced by the sober insight that imperial Austro-Hungary was followed by a small-sized, Serb dominated post-imperial structure. By describing the period when the text was written, the Second World War and the Ustashe reign of terror in contemporary Croatia, and in doing so particularly referring to the conversion of many former Habsburg officers to the side of fascist movements, Krleža also emphatically reveals his own conception of history, according to which historical events appear to be an eternal recurrence in which human stupidity is coupled with an excessive use of power and violence.