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Žarko Puhovski (* 1946)

• born on December 15, 1946 in Zagreb

• finished primary and secondary school in Zagreb

• studied philosophy in Germany

• taught philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb

• taught abroad

• one of the founders of the Association for the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative

• president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights

• public advocate of RECOM in Croatia

Žarko Puhovski is a political scientist, philosopher, political analyst and human rights activist. He was born on December 15, 1946 in Zagreb. Until his retirement, he was a teacher, assistant, and then professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, at the Department of Philosophy. He taught philosophy and politics, politics and ethics and other practical philosophical disciplines. He also taught abroad, for several years he led the postgraduate course of Peace Studies in Austria. Apart from stays abroad, he has lived in Zagreb, where he still lives today.

His father comes from a family of Polish origin. About his paternal grandfather, Josip, he says that “when he got a little drunk, he would consider himself a Pole, but in fact he was no longer a Pole”. His paternal grandmother, Josipa, was the only Croatian from all four grandparents. His other grandmother was a Hungarian Jew, born in Budapest, who came to Zagreb very young as a piano student and married his grandfather Jozef, who was an Albanian Catholic from the Dubrovnik area. According to the family legend, his grandmother from Hungary was the first woman in Zagreb who spoke English. She also spoke French, German and Hungarian. She traveled with her husband, who was an official of Zagrebačka banka and founded branches in different cities. Because of this, one of Žarko Puhovski’s aunts was born in Cetinje, another in Rijeka, and his mother in Novi Sad, where his grandfather founded branches of the bank.

At a time when women mostly worked in the house, his grandmother from Hungary gave piano lessons to private students. To a large extent, she raised Žarko and his brother because his mother and father worked after the Second World War.

He remebers that his parents told him stories about the time before World War II. It was a good time for them, they met in the “Sober Youth” organization and were leftist. His father’s family was “quite nationalist-oriented”. He remembers his grandmother’s stories about what life was like in Zagreb before World War II. She told him about the cultural life of the city, explaining where the young men gathered after the performance to greet the ballet dancers with flowers. He says of his family that they often had to change apartments and that they didn’t have a lot of money, but they had the “aspiration of a theatrical life, reading books and a cultural life”.

Žarko Puhovski says that he was raised first and foremost as a native of Zagreb: “I knew that there was those who were in Split and supported Hajduk who are different from us and those who were in Belgrade and supported Zvezda. But, for example, I didn’t know for a long time that I had a Serbian girl or a Serbian boy in my class.” His grandmother told him stories about Budapest in which the city was comparable to Paris and Vienna, and when he went to Budapest as an athlete in 1964, he was amazed by the city, which looked “completely hackneyed, completely ruined” to him as compared to Zagreb. Within the family, there was tension between the richer and poorer members of the extended family, and Žarko was raised in the spirit of the past: “We knew what to do, what we are supposed to do, what we are not to supposed to do. Never brown after 18:00h, never black before 18:00h... And all such things - who sits where and how. These are the things we learned, completely unnecessary of course.”

Although the Puhovski family lost 14 family members in the Second World War, that period was always talked about within the family with anecdotes and tragicomics that characterize Žarko Puhovski’s memories of the war. The topic that was seriously talked about was the contempt with which the partisans looked at the illegals who remained in Zagreb after the war. That’s how Žarko Puhovski remembers the jokes about the Ustashas and Germans that were shared in his family, and his mother’s disbelief when, after the war, she was told that in order to join the Communist Party, she should learn to curse. He did not listen to bloody stories about the war, but to tragicomic ones.

During the Second World War, Žarko Puhovski’s father and uncle were simultaneously in the Jasenovac camp. In 1941, his father took part in the burning of the stadium in Maksimir, and both of them helped the communist-partisan movement. His father and uncle were later released, and his father mostly did not want to talk about his experience in the camp. His uncle Đuro Puhovski talked about this, recounting how their friends and acquaintances bravely held on in the camp, they never talked about those who could not endure the imprisonment with dignity.

Žarko Puhovski recalls one of the stories in which there was no room for jokes: ” ...the camp was divided into various parts. There were these Croats who were mostly communists, suspected communists and so on, Serbs, Jews and so on, the Roma part was separated... and then it turned out that Serbs and Jews were getting more food than Croats. And then one of them said “For God’s sake, now we have in our country... again the Croats did the worst!” After a while they realized that the people they see through the wire are always different, that is, that the Croats were kept in prison and mostly weren’t killed except on special occasions... While the people on this other side... the population was changing, so to say demographically, so the Ustasha apparently fed them a little better to keep them calm until they did what they wanted to do with them. And of course all Croats understood the same after a while... it was difficult and embarrassing for them.” Žarko Puhovski remembers that it took a long time for the family to start talking about who betrayed his father and uncle and that his mother spoke about it when he was already in high school.

Another story related to the camp was the one about the man who organized the first partisan radio station in Zagreb. When he was sent to the camp, he persuaded the other prisoners that they had to build their own radio station. Although the others told him he was crazy, he piece by piece, screw by screw, started collecting the parts for the radio station: “And then they said, if the camp had lasted until 1950, maybe he would have really built a radio station in the camp”.

He knows that his aunt, and later his mother, looked after the son of Josip Broz Tito, Aleksandar Miša, for a while during the war. That’s how Žarko Puhovski actually got his name: “After the war, Comrade Žarko came to say thank you on Tito’s behalf, so I was named after him because my father, as a real Croatian fireman, actually wanted me to be called Vatroslav, that’s what he thought was appropriate. It seems awful to me today, but I guess I would get used to it over the years... And then, as a compromise as Žarko he came, it seemed convenient, if the baby was a boy, because then of course it couldn’t be known, that he should be named Žarko.”

When it comes to how the family talked about the Second World War, Žarko Puhovski says that there was no revanchism in those stories, except for the partisans, because they had no understanding of city life.

Žarko Puhovski also remembers stories from the period after the Second World War related to the conflict between Stalin and Tito. He remembers the story of how, at that time, professors of Russian in Zagreb ended up on Goli otok for no reason at all. His mother was also friends with Eva Grlić, who was also a prisoner on Goli otok: “That’s when we learned the story about how in some times you can get hurt because of two words and how very few people manage to hold on bravely.”

From stories that circulated in his family, he remembers that during the liberation of Zagreb, chaos and symbolic violence reigned over the remains of culture until the autumn of 1945. He remembers a story from his mother, who worked in the Ministry of Trade, and that at that time there was an important question as to whether some documents from the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), certificates, trade licenses and the like would be recognized. Another memory in the family was that Comrade Vladimir Bakarić forbade women to go to the office in pants and that female partisans got confused because Bakarić was an authority and they were supposed to do as he ordered.

There was no sentimental talk about those who died during the war in the family: “Because it’s simply not possible, we don’t have the capacity to grieve for fifteen people. It’s all luck, probably, but simply that fine scale “for number 3 I mourn a little more than for number 5, and for number 7... No one has that”.

Another of Žarko Puhovski’s memories is related to the reactions of his father and his uncle to the monument to the victims of Jasenovac designed by Bogdan Bogdanović. They were appalled by the idea of ​​erecting a monument in the shape of a flower, and Žarko remembers his uncle’s reaction: “For God’s sake, our people were there to fertilize the earth for his flower!”. His uncle considered the idea inhumane and understood the monument as a mockery of the victims. He remembers growing up with constant mockery of partisan monuments with the exception of Petrova gora and the monument at the Mirogoj cemetery. His family did not support the erection of abstract monuments after the Second World War.

Regarding the “nationalily” question in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, Žarko Puhovski says that there was a certain tension in the family between him and his father, who over time turned more towards nationalism. He remembers the first ugly stories from that period - that the Slovenians are to blame for the flood in Zagreb because they did not build the embankment properly, that the Serbs always cheat in football and that the referees help them. He remembers that after the replacement of Aleksandar Ranković, there were more such stories: “But we did not deal with whether the “nationalily” question  was resolved.” That at all... if someone had told me, I would have started laughing like crazy, I mean, what kind of question? Who asked what? Nobody understood that at all.”

However, the “nationalily” question became more and more important in the eighties and nineties. As one of the founders of the Association for the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (UJDI), Puhovski tried to offer an alternative according to which via internal reforms Yugoslavia could be preserved, but there were no conditions for this idea.

Žarko Puhovski’s message to young people is not to be afraid of politicization, because what he calls “political idiocy” can only be removed by the political engagement of new people with new qualities and qualifications.