Expellees Tell Tales: Partisan Blood Drinkers and the Cultural History of Violence after
World War II
Author(s): Monica Black
Source: History and Memory, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013), pp. 77-110
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo.25.1.77
Accessed: 11-09-2016 10:11 UTC
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Expellees Tell Tales
Partisan Blood Drinkers and the Cultural
History of Violence after World War II
Monica Black
This article examines stories told after 1945 by ethnic German refugees from the
Banat region of Yugoslavia about encounters they had with Partisans—fighters
in Josip Broz Tito’s army—who had become vampires. The essay situates these
tales firmly within their place of origin and views them as an idiom through which
Yugoslavian Germans described wartime acts of, encounters with, and anxieties
about violence. This idiom had diverse cultural roots, and was inflected by memories of partisan warfare in World War I, as well as by gender, religious culture and
local folklore surrounding blood. Through a contextualized reading of sto; ries
about blood-drinking Partisans, the essay offers a window onto a psychology of
violence and its legacies in the wake of war and makes a plea for taking fantasy
and the monstrous seriously as objects of historical analysis.

In the time of battle, the Partisans drink no water, no wine or
schnapps, only blood!1
After World War II, ethnic-German former inhabitants of the Yugoslavian
Banat region—often referred to as Danube Swabians, or Donauschwaben—recalled chilling encounters they had with “Tito Partisans” who
had become vampires.2 When provoked in particular ways, or even for no
reason at all, Swabians reported, Partisans—members of the multiethnic,
communist-revolutionary and insurgent fighting force led by Josip Broz
Tito during the war—would suddenly froth at the mouth and fall into
terrifying, demonic and convulsive states, which could only be ameliorated
by drinking blood—and Swabian blood (Schwabenblut) at that.
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Monica Black
Tales of vampire Partisans were recorded in the late 1940s and early
1950s by a folklorist and former National Socialist and SS man named
Alfred Karasek (1902–70). Today, they belong to one of the largest legend
archives in Germany.3 Karasek gathered all sorts of stories and prophecies
told after the war by expellees (Vertriebene), as ethnic-German refugees
from eastern Europe came almost uniformly to be identified in West Germany.4 These stories and prophecies often featured visions of retribution
and redemption—describing upraised fists materializing in night skies
stained the color of blood or apparitions of the Virgin Mary or Jesus.5
Equal parts oral reportage, folklore and fantasy, the tales in the Karasek
archive narrate experiences and perceptions of violence in the chaotic last
moments of the war and its immediate aftermath.
In Yugoslavia as in many parts of Europe, the months following the
war saw not a cessation but a continuation of violence. Across much of
the continent, forms of authority shifted dramatically, and governments
fell and new ones gradually emerged or were installed to take their place.
Mass reprisals, purges, rapes, summary executions, wholesale expropriations,
public rituals of humiliation and retribution, pogroms, private vendettas and mass population displacements and expulsions characterized the
experiences of a great many Europeans after the war ended, and this settling of scores often took shape along national or ethnic lines.6 The Banat
Swabian experience belongs to this history. Unlike some of their fellow
Danube Swabians—those from the neighboring regions of Bačka and
Baranya, for example, of whom about half were evacuated in 1944—only
around 10 percent of Banat Germans left before the war ended.7 Identified
in its wake with the defeated Nazi overlords who had begun occupying
Yugoslavia in 1941, most ethnic Germans had their land confiscated and
some were stripped of their citizenship by the new communist government.8 They faced summary executions, massacres, deportations.9 They
were rounded up en masse, and some were sent to concentration and
labor camps, where they died in considerable numbers.10 Some 27,000
to 37,000, the bulk of whom were women aged 18–40, were sent to the
Soviet Union to perform forced labor, and many Swabian children under
age sixteen—some 35,000 to 40,000—were separated from their parents.11
Like ethnic German refugees from other parts of Europe, Swabians were
ultimately forced to make new homes for themselves in East or West
Germany, Austria or elsewhere.12
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Expellees Tell Tales
There now exists a substantial literature, historical and sociological,
on postwar German refugee populations. This literature has been concerned chiefly with the politics surrounding refugees in East and West
Germany, the difficulties they encountered in assimilating to majority
populations, and with the memory of flight and expulsion in post-1945
German history.13 This essay’s object is different. It hopes to contribute
to an interpretive, cultural history of late-wartime and postwar violence
in Europe, of which German flight and expulsions formed a considerable
part. It highlights storytelling, oral tradition, memory and rumor during
World War II and in its chaotic aftermath as forms of communication,
ways of explaining a world turned upside down.14 Tales about Partisans
who drank Swabian blood were the very idiom in which many Swabians
explained violent wartime and postwar encounters to themselves and others. Those tales, as we will see, were anything but a “German national”
reaction to “Slavic” Partisans. They had multiform, transnational origins
commingling Danube Swabian, Austrian, “Reich” German, Balkan, Serbian
and many other cultural elements. They were an indigenous response to
unprecedented circumstances that called on a diverse repertoire of local
knowledge.
A certain path has already been cleared for the essay’s endeavors by
folklorist Utz Jeggle. In a highly evocative but all-too-brief 1987 essay,
Jeggle described tales about Partisan blood drinkers as a psychological
response, in part, to the cataclysm of ethnic war and defeat and underscored
how communal crisis often appears to unleash phantasms, wild rumors
and uncanny stories.15 He classified the tales as “legends” (Sagen)—that
is, as examples of a specific narrative genre—because, he argued, they
claimed to refer to reality and simultaneously told of something “numinous, unbelievable.” What gives legends the power and authority of
reality, Jeggle wrote, is that through being told and retold, they permit
the unthinkable to be thought, and in that sense verify “events that seem
to lie outside our reality.”16
There is a great deal to these observations, as the considerable scholarship on the role of rumor in history powerfully attests. Yet, as is true
of other historical cases in which rumor has played a role, tales about
blood-drinking Partisans, as uncanny as they appear at first glance, cannot be attributed exclusively to an eruption of irrationality in a moment
of chaos and distress.17 Some were recounted years after the war ended,
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Monica Black
when many Banat Swabians had started new lives in new places, far from
forced labor camps and transport trains. And yet the tales did have chimerical and fantastic aspects, and these are crucial, I would argue, to
how the stories should be interpreted. What made vampire narratives so
compelling and worthy of telling and retelling for Banat Swabians was
precisely the fact that they were rooted equally and irretrievably in fantasy
and reality, memory and history. As we will see, these stories constituted
a highly visceral form of knowledge of a set of experiences for a particular
community. They formed a specific and meaningful way for Swabians to
talk about things that had come to pass and that often must have seemed
like things that had happened before. The tales had their basis in oral traditions, popular prejudices and local knowledge, as well as in folklore and
memories that stretched back at least to World War I in the region—and
probably much further. They spoke to the phantasmagorical elements
of a war of conquest and extermination, but were also linked to explicit
events. Tales about Partisans who drank Swabian blood have things to
tell us about the cultural history of violence in the immediate post–World
War II period and offer us access to a particular mental world. They also
remind us that just as experience finds its wellspring in memory, so too is
memory nourished by experience.

Partisan fever
The Danube Swabians were among the as many as 15 million German
citizens and members of German minority populations who fled or were
expelled from their home communities in eastern and southern Europe at
the end of World War II.18 In West Germany, German refugees began to
tell of their experiences of what came generally to be known as “the expulsion” (die Vertreibung) as soon as the war ended. Some of these accounts
appeared in print. A team of eminent West German historians working under
the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Expellees, Refugees and Victims of
War, for example, collected and published scores of testimonies as part of a
multi-volume work, the Documentation of the Expulsion of the Germans of
East-Central Europe.19 Historians working on the Documentation selected
the testimonies they used in the volumes carefully, vigorously scrubbing
them of expressions of self-pity, explicit anticommunism and polemic.20
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Expellees Tell Tales
In sharp contrast to the relatively measured tone of the Documentation’s
testimonies were the often far more graphic accounts published by church
presses and in refugee newspapers, newsletters and books. Some of these
described extraordinary, even fantastical acts of cruelty and violence committed by Czechs, Poles, Soviets, “partisans” and others against expellees
and refugees during their flight from their homelands.21
Yet none of the stories in the genre of what we might call expellee
narratives—published or unpublished—is quite comparable to those told
by Danube Swabians about Partisans who drank blood. Many times over
in the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, often long after they had fled
or been driven from their former towns and villages, Swabian refugees
repeated stories of brutal and terrifying encounters they had had with
“Tito Partisans.” Afflicted by something called “Partisan fever” (Partisanenseuche, Partisanenwahn), the latter would allegedly fall into frenzied
states in which they would become unnaturally physically powerful and
cry out for “sweet Swabian blood” through gritted teeth. Later, it was
said, they would come back to their senses, sometimes withdrawing into
a corner to mutter incoherently to themselves.
That tales about blood-drinking Partisans were captured for posterity
at all is due in considerable measure to the folklorist and SS man Alfred
Karasek. Born in the Sudetenland, Karasek grew up in Bielitz, in Austrian
Silesia, which became part of Poland after World War I.22 During World
War II, he was involved in the process of “resettling” ethnic Germans
from Volhynia and Bessarabia in Germany. He was also a member of the
Sonderkommando Künsberg, a unit that operated (after 1941) as part of
the Waffen SS. It swept behind the Wehrmacht to confiscate the contents
of diplomatic and state archives and libraries deemed to be of particular
strategic or scholarly interest to the Nazi state. After 1945 Karasek more
or less seamlessly returned to civilian life and to his scholarly work. The
main portion of that work was his contribution to the revanchist field
of “expellee folklore,” or Vertriebenenvolkskunde, which focused on the
effects, on ethnic-German communities, of their expulsion from eastern
Europe in the aftermath of the war.
One of the first tasks of expellee folklore, from Karasek’s point of
view, was to gather stories from expellees about their experiences. Since
the beginning of his career in the 1920s, much of Karasek’s work had
been devoted to collecting fables and legends. As a young researcher, he
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Monica Black
had traveled to German-speaking communities in the Sudetenland, Silesia,
Volhynia and far beyond, gathering tales that he supposed to have both
ethnic and regional characteristics. He continued this work after World
War II. Himself a refugee, he traveled from place to place and camp to
camp, chronicling stories in various settings, formal and informal, where
expellees and expellee organizations met. It was in these settings that he
recorded stories about Partisan fever, among other narratives related to
the expulsion. It is important to note that though Karasek was a revanchist and former Nazi, and though he published tales about such wonders
as the return of the dead and apparitions of the Virgin, the Christ child
and avenging angels, he appears not to have published the blood-drinker
stories he was told by Danube Swabians.23 Perhaps he found the tales too
fantastic to take seriously—even as evidence of German victimization, a
not-infrequent theme of his postwar writing, published and unpublished.
Yet as suggested above, the episodes that Danube Swabian expellees
witnessed and described were no mere phantasms, at least not entirely.
Partisan fever was a recognized medical condition in Yugoslavia in the
postwar years. Clinics specialized in its etiology and treatment, and symposia
were organized to discuss research into its causes and effects. One of the
first to publish on it in the German-speaking world was the SlovenianJewish psychoanalyst and antifascist Paul Parin, who had himself served
the Partisans as a doctor during the war.24 In 1948, Parin published an
article on war neurosis, based on observations he made while serving as
the chief physician in Swiss medical missions to Prijedor and Zagreb in
Yugoslavia between 1944 and 1946. He noted that Partizanska bolest,
or “Partisan disease,” was “so common in that country that practically
everyone is accustomed to and capable of diagnosing it.”25 The most
remarkable symptom of the condition, Parin wrote, was the “attack” (der
Anfall). He described in detail one such episode, which he had witnessed
on a Danube ferry between Belgrade and Pančevo in August 1945. An
otherwise unremarkable young man, around twenty-two, strong, healthy
and dressed in a sergeant’s uniform, suddenly broke off speaking and lay
down on the deck. His eyes began to turn in his head and he ground his
teeth. His breathing became intermittent, his face went purple and his
pupils dilated. He dug his fists with such force into his coat pockets that
one of them was torn through. After a moment the soldier’s arms and
legs began to flail. He threw himself on to his back and began to fire with
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Expellees Tell Tales
an invisible machine gun. He screwed his eyes up tight and then began
to scream at what Parin took to be his (again, invisible) fellow Partisans.
Soon after, he again became calm, and when he regained consciousness,
seemed to have no memory of the incident.26
In their general outlines, and in terms simply of what it looked like,
the depictions of Partisan fever given by German expellees from the Banat
accorded quite accurately with Parin’s observations. They emphasized the
loss of control over their bodies that Partisans seemed to exhibit when
in the throes of an attack, the flailing of limbs and the gnashing of teeth.
Expellees telling about Partisan fever also spoke of moments in which
the person suffering from the condition appeared to be experiencing a
different reality, talking to people who were not present or shooting with
invisible guns. A Swabian woman named Judit Prohaska, from Brestovac,
explained: “They writhe on the ground, cry out for Swabian blood, and
act as though they are shooting, even though they have no weapon in
their hands. Almost everyone of us who has been in a camp in the city
or lived amongst the Serbs somewhere has heard about it or experienced
it himself.”27
Not only did Prohaska’s account concur in many respects with Parin’s
observations, but accounts given by different Swabians also tended to be
fundamentally similar to one another. In many ways, stories about Partisan fever exemplify what John Horne and Alan Kramer, in their work on
World War I rumors, have called a legend complex: they are a cluster of
narratives that, though different in their individual details, nonetheless
have an internal coherence or share central themes or essential elements.28
We might also say, as Prohaska’s statements suggest, that tales of Partisan
fever comprised a group of stories whose outlines and dominant motifs
already seemed to be known to everyone telling them: almost all Swabians, Prohaska said, had seen episodes of the affliction or heard about
them. The special tendency of women Partisans to be afflicted was one
such dominant motif; “the Partisan” as a sinister, inhuman and uniquely
trangressive figure was another. In some tales, Partisans were said to suffer severe bouts of conscience that could cause their sickness to become
manifest. In others, Partisan confessions of guilt led to an increased desire
to drink Swabian blood. The following account, published in the expellee
newsletter Neuland in 1950, captures a number of the themes common

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Monica Black
to the legend complex surrounding Partisan fever. It is worth excerpting
at some length:
Thousands of witnesses tell of a terrible sickness that … most often
afflicts gun-toting Partisan wenches (Flintenweiber). The sickness
takes the form of epileptic-like episodes, wherein the body of the
afflicted is overtaken as if by a demon and hurled to the ground and
left writhing in the mud and filth and dust. Intermittently, the afflicted make bestial sounds, and foam comes from their mouths and
noses until their bodies, as if lashed by the furies, collapse, battered
and flayed.… Hundreds of these unhappy creatures, who tortured
their victims in the most improbable ways before murdering them
by cutting off their ears or noses, gouging out their eyes, cutting off
their womanly or manly sex organs, or ripping out their tongues,
found a terrible end. [This was despite the fact that] they had seen
themselves as gods [during the war] and acted as though they had
absolute power over life and death. During an attack, those afflicted
report snatches of their horrifying experiences [in the war]; others, with bloodshot eyes, express their desire, like wolves, to drink
“fascist” blood….29
What does this account tell us? In short: Partisan fever mostly afflicted
female Partisans; it transformed its victims—who had only recently masqueraded as the god-like arbiters of life and death—into ravening beasts; it
led to episodes in which those afflicted by it would suffer dramatic physical symptoms—characterized as the punishments of the furies—and then
confess to terrible crimes; it produced a desire to drink “fascist” blood.
Moreover, Partisan fever, the extended passage above further suggests, was also believed to be catching. It was said that a Partisan hearing
the cries of another in the throes of an attack could herself (or himself)
succumb to an attack.30 A Swabian named Philipp Ungar said that hearing
mention of or speaking with a German could cause an attack, as could
“a troubled conscience.”31 Ungar, like some other Swabians, claimed
that Partisans being with other Partisans invited attacks. One woman
explained, “When they have an attack, they foam at the mouth and have
to talk constantly.… They have to tell all about the past, everything, even
their most secret thoughts and about the most horrible things they did.
When an attack overcomes them, none of them hears any longer what
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Expellees Tell Tales
the others are saying.… [They] try to yell over each other and everyone
tries to outdo the others’ horror stories with his own.”32 Another Banat
refugee, living in a settlement near Darmstadt in 1951, explained:
the Serbs say the sickness takes many forms. It can lie, like a heavy
stone, on the heart [of the sufferer] and crush it to death. The afflicted will scream from the pain and beg that someone take his
burden from him. And when he is on his deathbed, he will want to
confess and acknowledge his sins, so that it will go easier for him.…
Mostly they say that increases the evil craving. Then he will have
foam coming from his mouth, and will cry out for blood and want to
drink it.… There is one I remember still: one of the Partisan leaders,
who became melancholic from the fever. He would huddle up in a
dark corner, in a ball, and mutter quietly, they are coming to get me,
the murdered ones, [and] one after the other they came to him.33
It will have become clear from these few initial examples that Partisan fever, among other things, seems to have a lot to do with Swabians’
alternating feelings of revenge (Partisans being punished by the furies
and the ghosts of the dead) and victimization, a commonplace theme
in the generally one-sided and self-pitying memorial culture of the early
Federal Republic.34 But feelings of victimization cannot alone explain the
particular symbolic and emotional character of the stories, nor the events
they described: of all things, why blood drinking? Why “Tito Partisans”?
Why did Tito Partisans get infected with the fever by admitting guilt, by
hearing about the war or by hearing about Swabians? Interpreting Partisan
fever means being aware of the tendency many Germans had after World
War II to think of themselves foremost as victims and being attentive to
the forms popular discourses of victimization took. After all, many expellees told about their experiences after the war, but stories about Partisan
blood drinkers are specific to Danube Swabians. Their content is rooted in
a locality and in that locality’s unique historical legacies and circumstances.
The most immediate of those legacies and circumstances was Yugoslavia’s wartime and immediate postwar history. Following the invasion
and dismemberment of the country by the Axis powers in 1941, there
ensued some of the most extreme fighting of the whole of the war, which
took the form of merciless campaigns of terror and counter-terror by the
Germans, their allies and various Yugoslav resistance factions.35 In Serbia,
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Monica Black
the Germans’ campaign against Tito’s Partisans involved a policy of terror carried out “against the population as a whole without distinction.”36
This policy “consist[ed] of the extermination of all those even remotely
suspected of supporting the Partisans.”37 In this period, and until the fall
of 1944, the Banat remained under the direct military occupation of the
Reich. Swabians there enjoyed the protection of the German army, and,
if they were fortunate enough to qualify on racial and political grounds
as members of the Volksgemeinschaft—the racial, national or “people’s”
community—they also benefited economically and socially from that
privileged status.38 Some availed themselves of Jewish property—agricultural and industrial—that was “aryanized” under the new order.39 Others
participated in wartime violence. Banat Swabians joined the infamous SS
Division Prinz Eugen, which was responsible for atrocities and reprisals
against civilians. They also played a role in the notorious counterinsurgency
operations of the Wehrmacht’s 342nd Infantry Division in northwest Serbia in 1941, with some working as Erfassungskommando—“requisition”
details charged with seizing livestock and fodder from their neighbors.40
All in all, Thomas Casagrande writes, “the overwhelming majority of the
German-speaking population was an important source of support for the
German occupation regime.”41
At the same time, living under the occupation, Swabian identity
underwent a shift. Until the 1930s ethnic Germans were a minority
population among others in a multiethnic Yugoslavia. With Hitler’s rise to
power, and because of their overwhelming support for the Nazi cause and
Nazi war thereafter, Danube Swabians now constituted a wholly distinct
group. They were not just a minority ethnic population, but ideological
enemies and targets of Partisan revenge.42 This became especially clear
once the German army retreated. With Tito and the communists in the
saddle, Swabians found themselves on the receiving end of violence and
displacement. Scattered to the four winds thereafter, it would have been
surprising if all sorts of rumors had not flourished among them. A legacy
of insecurity, of status gained and lost, of horrific violence—committed,
witnessed, endured—may have produced an atmosphere in which even
fantastic rumors of violence were unlikely to have been discounted as
improbable.43
National Socialism forms a second, proximate legacy bearing on
Swabian narratives about Partisan blood drinkers. Nazi thinking had
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Expellees Tell Tales
deeply politicized blood, reordered the cultural meanings imputed to it,
and heightened the value of blood deemed “German.” In Yugoslavia, as
was true under the German occupation in other parts of Europe, having
the “right” blood often meant the difference between life and death. But
the Nazis also proclaimed German blood to be “precious” and treated it
as part of a symbolic economy that was at once racial, moral and spiritual.
Blood was used in the Banat—and this, too, was true across much of the
Nazi empire—to establish a connection between the conquering Germans
and local soil, thus allowing the Nazis to claim sovereignty over occupied
territory. In April 1941 in the Banat city of Pančevo, a local German was
killed by “Chetniks.” This event had followed the killing of eight other
Germans by the Yugoslav army a few days earlier. When German troops
arrived to occupy Pančevo shortly after, they ordered the corpses of the
nine men exhumed. Their coffins were displayed on a catafalque in a
local park, covered with flowers, before ultimately being reburied. A local
German-language newspaper referred to the dead as “blood witnesses”
(Blutzeugen), whose spirit would ensure that the local earth remained
“German for eternity.”44
Wartime and postwar terror and violence and Nazi preoccupations
with blood are important proximate contexts to bear in mind as we move
forward. But longer-term frames of reference are equally significant.
Some predated World War II and are likely to have disposed Swabians
to understand and report on their experiences after the war in particular
ways. To begin with, and most signally, partisan conflict itself was far
from an unknown experience for inhabitants of the region. Indeed for
many Swabians it would have been a part of living memory, with origins
in World War I. From the start of that conflict, the Habsburg Army had
feared the threat of komitadji (Serb guerilla) violence in Serbian portions
of the empire and in Serbia itself. The Serb population as a whole was
readily transformed in the minds of Habsburg military leaders, ordinary
soldiers and civilians alike into a “shadow army of spies and saboteurs.”
The komitadji became a “liminal figure, who destabilized the boundary
between civilian and soldier.”45
Habsburg military commanders saw komitadji simultaneously through
the lens of history and memory, imagining partisan Serbs in terms inherited
from earlier conflicts. According to Jonathan E. Gumz, Serb partisans in
World War I were linked to the nationalist uprisings of 1848, and became,
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Monica Black
in the minds of military leaders, a “‘revolutionary’ phantom that combined
the nation and mass politics.”46 This pattern—of seeing one’s present
enemy in terms left over from prior conflicts—was in no way unique to
the Habsburg Army or to the history of Austria. The German army, too,
had feared the possibility of a levée en masse during its invasion of Belgium
and France in 1914. In that war, Germans connected the threat of popular insurrection to the specter of the franc-tireur—an image of a lawless,
deceitful, inhuman fighter—inherited from the Franco-Prussian War.47
To these memories of earlier conflicts, irregular warfare, and ethnic
discord we should also add that “disproportionately large numbers of
Wehrmacht officers serving in Yugoslavia were actually Austrian” and had
a particular, historical hostility to Serbs.48 This hostility went back at least
as far as the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and to Serb atrocities in those conflicts.49 As Ben Shepherd notes, “It was after all Austria which, for several
years before WWI, had engaged in increasingly antagonistic rivalry with
Serbia over control of the Balkans, and whose heir to the throne had been
assassinated by a Serb in 1914.”50 The commanding general in Serbia in
World War II, Franz Böhme—author of a notorious reprisal order that
called for the lives of 100 Serbs for every German killed—was himself
Austrian and called on his largely Austrian troops to “avenge themselves
for the Austrian blood spilt as a result of ‘Serb treachery’” in World War I.51
Yet given the explicitly ethnic quality of these historical patterns, it is
noteworthy that Danube Swabians after World War II emphasized Partisan
fever as an affliction not of Serbs (or any particular ethnic group), but of
Partisans. Two women from the Banat, living in the Piding expellee camp
in Bavaria in the early 1950s, reported,
our German soldiers, even those who fought … in the woods [a euphemism for partisan fighting], never got it, and no German POW
or imprisoned Swabian ever got it.… Even among the Serbs, only the
Tito Partisans got it. The Nedić people [Serb fighters connected to
Milan Nedić, the leader of German-allied Serbia], who also fought
… in the woods, showed no signs of having such episodes (haben
solche Anfälle nicht gezeigt), nor did even the proper soldiers on the
Russian side. So it is not a soldiers’ sickness that orderly, respectable
soldiers get, but something else.52

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Expellees Tell Tales
A Swabian engineer named Sachradnik similarly noted, “It is for certain
that these attacks and nervous problems affected the Partisans more than
a regular army is affected by war. It must have something to do with the
lawlessness of Partisan warfare and with all those sorts of terrible events.”53
In other words, whatever their complicated origins, Swabian tales
about bloodthirsty Partisans were not rooted, at least not principally, in
ethnic hubris or racism—a theme that has tended to dominate scholarship
on the Third Reich at war until quite recently.54 Rather, they described a
specific fear of Partisans (whatever their ethnicity), which may have had
immediate historical referents, especially for that generation of Swabians
who had lived through the First World War. Stories about violence committed by komitadji had been especially widespread in the Banat during
that prior conflict, and focused on the particular danger posed by an unseen
enemy, who is immoral because he is “lawless” and refuses to conform
to the rules of warfare (by wearing uniforms, for example).55 This notion
also emerged in World War II stories about Partisan blood drinkers. Yet
while in the earlier context, komitadji and Serb seem to have been virtually synonymous, this was not true in the later context. Deep-seated fears
of the Partisans were more likely a composite of memories of irregular
fighting in World War I, Partisan violence in World War II and postwar
anti-German reprisals under the Tito-led, communist regime.56 In other
words, thinking with the fearsome image of the Partisan—inhuman,
treacherous, barbarous; lurking in the woods, invisible, anarchic—helps
us historicize how Danube Swabians may have perceived and interpreted
Partisan fever. “Race” does not.
Gender, on the other hand, does. As we have seen, a number of Danube
Swabians insisted after World War II that women were more often afflicted
than men with Partisan fever.57 Engineer Sachradnik explained, “fits [of
Partisan fever] mostly afflicted girls and women, men more seldom.” He
attributed this to women’s lack of “inner robustness and the hard conscience
[of] men,” which led insurgent fighting to take “the greatest toll on their
nerves and affect them the most.”58 To understand these statements we
have to return again to the region’s history in the First World War. In that
conflict, the Habsburg Army believed that Serbian women were fighting
as komitadjis. The army considered this grossly transgressive, and it only
served to deepen their perception of partisan treachery.59 The belief that
women fighters were shooting at the army from behind was taken as yet
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Monica Black
another indication that the levée en masse the Habsburg Army feared was
indeed taking shape.
Then, in the wake of World War I, another image of the armed woman
emerged among German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers who, following
the 1917 October Revolution, fought the Bolsheviks at the Eastern Front:
the Flintenweib, or “gun-toting wench.” The reader may recall the term’s
use in the extended passage quoted above (p. 84). It is highly pejorative.
In his evocative study of the Freikorps movement, Klaus Theweleit notes
that Flinte, a word for gun, could also refer to the penis or a prostitute;
the Flintenweib was a “fantasized proletarian woman who awakens …
fear in hardened soldiers.” In Theweleit’s reading, the armed “proletarian
whore” has a penis; with it, she provokes fears of castration, and ultimately
of “total annihilation.”60 Erich F. Berendt, a Freikorps-man who fought
the Bolsheviks in East Prussia in 1919, described Flintenweiber in his
memoirs as the kind of “barbarous furies only Bolshevism could devise
… bestialized and without any human feeling.”61 Clearly, the Flintenweib
image, which made the right-wing paramilitary rounds after World War
I, was embedded in multiple German-speaking cultures—inside and outside Germany, from the Baltic to the Balkans. More generally, the image
of the emancipated Bolshevik woman inspired panic among nationalist
conservatives throughout Europe.
That there were actual, and not merely phantom, women Partisans
in Yugoslavia in World War II, and in relatively significant numbers, surely
only added to the terror inspired by blood-drinking Partisans.62 Women
fighters in the Banat in both World Wars suggested a world turned upside
down, one in which the usual rules (already violated by male Partisans)
had ceased to have meaning. As engineer Sachradnik’s comments above
indicate, violence was thought to have a more devastating effect on women;
it was not “natural” for them, and they were not thought to have the
“robustness” of constitution necessary to master its effects. More pointedly, the frequency of the claims on the part of Danube Swabians about
the tendency of women Partisans to be afflicted with Partisanenseuche
suggests that their participation in combat was beyond comprehension,
a massive breach in the order of things. But clearly the woman fighter
conjured more than one image: on the one hand, the castrating Flintenweib; on the other, a psychologically feeble weakling—which of course

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Expellees Tell Tales
fit the contemporary stereotype of women as being prone to “hysteria”
in traumatic situations.
An additional parallel between the contexts of the two World Wars
in the Banat is the emphasis placed on specific kinds of violence allegedly
carried out by partisans in each instance. Habsburg officers in World War
I “actively disseminated stories among troops” about soldiers being castrated or having their noses or ears lopped off or their corpses mutilated.63
Danube Swabian expellees told of similar acts after World War II—of
Partisans who blinded their victims, or cut off their noses, ears, tongues
or genitalia. Following Marc Bloch, Horne and Kramer point out that
the German army’s response to rumors about francs-tireurs in Belgium
and France at the outset of World War I may have “drawn on themes
which the human imagination … has ceaselessly recycled since the dawn
of time.”64 Bloch’s interest in fausses nouvelles (false news) disseminated
during World War I led him to view certain kinds of narratives as always
originating in preexisting collective representations—particularly those
having to do with bodily violation.65 Tales of partisan violence in both
World Wars in the Banat share a number of overlapping elements, including
themes of bodily mutilation, desecration and moral/gender transgression.
These are the kinds of narratives that reappear again and again “over long
stretch[es] of history, point[ing] to the existence of certain archetypal or
mythic narratives that translate fears and fantasies lodged deep in human
consciousness.”66 This suggests that the kinds of dangers people perceived,
the fears they had of Partisans as liminal figures, lurking “in the woods”
and waiting to cut off hands and ears and sexual organs, can be linked to
a deep substratum of the human imagination and psychology. In many
different historical moments, certain images of bodily violation appear
over and over. Yet Partisans did engage in mutilations of their enemies
in World War II—Swabians, presumably, among them. They gouged out
eyes, sliced off ears and genitalia.67 Knowledge and rumors of such acts
likely produced feelings of profound bodily vulnerability, and there may
have been considerable fluidity, even an indivisibility, between stories of
mishandling and mishandling “itself.” Tales of violation may have arisen
in particular instances from reality, but they were structured by known
images, representations, and tales of violation (whether directly or indirectly
known or experienced). Experience ordered imagination; imagination
ordered experience.
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Monica Black
Vampire stories
The contexts described above, both proximate and longer-term, may have
been conducive to the telling of uncanny stories. At the same time, none
of the circumstances described—whether memories of earlier conflicts,
Nazi preoccupations with blood, the terror inspired by irregular combat,
transgressive women fighters or transgressive forms of violence—was
wholly unique to Yugoslavia in World War II. Partisan warfare took place
in other parts of Europe, and had taken place before. In Poland, Ukraine
and the Baltic states—Hitler and Stalin’s “bloodlands”—local populations
paid a terrible price.68 But if the context of the war in Yugoslavia was not
singular, Partisan vampire stories certainly were. Thus, while context provides us with a setting, a sense of possibilities, limitations and preexisting
conditions, it does not provide an interpretation or a sense of meaning.
For that, we will have to go a bit deeper.
Let us return to the category of “bodily violation,” and the very
specific form of it—blood drinking—with which we are dealing. In many
cultures in different moments in time, people have talked about other
people taking, collecting, stealing, drinking or otherwise using their blood,
mostly toward nefarious ends. Europe has its vampire legends, which,
moreover, find some of their roots in the Banat—a subject to which I
will return momentarily. Europe is also the home of the infamous blood
libel and its narratives of Jews ritually murdering Christian children to
extract their blood for religious uses. In colonial Africa, tales flourished
about mumiani—agents of British imperialism (firemen, game rangers and
mine managers among them) who stole blood in Tanganyika, Rhodesia,
Uganda and elsewhere.69 And in the 1930s and 1940s, in the puppet state
of Manchukuo under Japanese occupation, Chinese told about vampire
doctors who dug up graves, cut corpses open and took out their organs
and blood.70 Clearly, while stories about blood drinking, stealing, and
collecting can be found in many places, they have unique characteristics
in each setting.
Some historical tales about taking blood, like the blood libel, are
pure fantasy. Others, Ruth Rogaski points out, are quite true to life. In
the Manchurian case, Chinese stories about grave-robbing doctors could
describe the very real and monstrous experiments conducted by the
Japanese Imperial Army’s biological warfare division, Unit 731, mostly
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Expellees Tell Tales
on Chinese prisoners.71 But all tales of blood stealing and blood drinking
and the like present the historian with questions of considerable epistemological complexity, as Luise White points out in Speaking with Vampires,
her sophisticated and innovative study of rumor in colonial Africa. Like
Rogaski’s stimulating work on Manchurian vampire doctors, White’s work
has lessons for historians across many fields. Bear in mind, Partisans said
they drank blood, as demonstrated by the epigraph at the beginning of
this essay—“in the time of battle, the Partisans drink no water, no wine
or schnapps, only blood!” How they meant this, of course, is debatable.
In the Serbian language, “drinking blood” can be used colloquially to
mean doing harm, hurting or killing someone.72 Partisans may have
spoken about blood drinking in different, figurative ways and had their
words interpreted literally. This may explain why none of the sources I
have read indicate anyone ever actually seeing blood drinking take place,
only Partisans calling for Swabian blood. At the same time, Partisans had
lopped off ears and gouged out eyes; they had been armed women who
killed men. Just how transgressive were they? This may have been an open
question for some Swabians. Karasek recorded a story in which a Swabian
man described a woman Partisan who apparently worked at or near a
camp in Borski Rudnik. In the throes of Partisan fever, the woman—“a
terrible wench” (sehr schlechtes Frauenzimmer)—latched on to a Swabian.
“A guard had to come and free him,” the man reported, “else she would
have bitten through his throat with her teeth; he had already bled a lot.”73
This image of throat biting and blood drawing provokes the obvious
question: were tales about Partisan sickness indeed vampire stories? Danube
Swabians never used the term, to my knowledge, in their narratives of
Partisanenseuche. But the Banat was a part of the vampire’s original central
European and Balkan homeland. It was there, on the Habsburg-Ottoman
frontier in 1725, that a medical official in the Austrian army first wrote back
to Vienna to describe a most curious set of developments. Local villagers
in Medvegya, near Belgrade, had dug up a corpse, run it through with a
stake and burned it. The dead person in question, whom locals referred
to as vampyr, had been coming out of the grave to harm the living. A few
years later, another medical officer described the “execution” of another
vampire in another village; his report “rapidly reached all the European
capitals … [and] spread the monster’s fame.”74

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Monica Black
The vampire represented a crisis for Christendom, Erik Butler writes,
because it “did not fit … established demonological categories, parodied the
incorruptible bodies of the saints, and perverted the idea that the souls of
the dead had a definite location in the divine plan.” More broadly, Butler
argues that vampires “both as a signifier and as a signified, [move] between
the categories of self and other, the familiar and the strange … the temporal
and the eternal.”75 Neither fully dead nor alive, the vampire is a creature
recognizably human and yet terrifyingly not. But as anyone who begins
to delve into the literature on the vampire (historical, folkloric, literary,
philological) will quickly note, beyond these general observations, there
is simply no agreed-upon definition of the term or what it represents or
even where it comes from. There is, in a word, no such thing as a “real”
vampire, even metaphorically, but rather a suggestive collection of traits,
characteristics and stories.76 While the vampire might have supernatural
qualities and abilities, White’s and Rogaski’s work confirms that we need
not imagine him or her that way—as an undead creature who leaves the
grave at night to consume the blood of the living. She need not look
like Bela Lugosi or Max Schreck. The vampire can be a mine manager, a
fireman, a doctor in a clean, white coat in a laboratory filled with sharp,
bright instruments; she can be an extractor, a monstrous, parasitical being
that takes things away, takes life away, crosses boundaries, preys on the
vulnerable.
Given the specific location from which tales of Partisan blood drinkers emerged, the region’s folkloric traditions, not to mention the vampire
of literature and screen—well established by the middle of the twentieth
century—could Banat Swabians have talked about blood-drinking Partisans and not have been talking about vampires? Like komitadji in World
War I, like the castrating Flintenweib, like ideas about precious, empireconquering blood, the vampire was part of “background” social knowledge
in the region. Stories about Partisan fever were tales of blood drinking and
contagion—and contagious blood drinkers. These motifs were fundamental to vampire legends as they developed since the eighteenth century in
Habsburg central Europe.77 At a minimum, stories about Partisan blood
drinkers told about having things taken away. But they also told of harm,
victimization, degradation, madness, disease, contagion, humiliation and
powerlessness.

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Expellees Tell Tales
Folklore and oral tales need not have an internal logic, much as we
may feel compelled to search for one. White for example writes that “inaccuracies in [stories of blood extraction in Africa] make them exceptionally
reliable historical sources … [because] they offer historians a way to see
the world the way the storytellers did, as a world of vulnerability and
unreasonable relationships.”78 And in the Banat, I hasten to suggest, of
inversion. Danube Swabians had endured a great deal of political, social and
economic upheaval since the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Those who wound up citizens of Yugoslavia after the Treaty of Trianon
often experienced a reduction of their status, including the seizing of
their larger estates in that nation’s 1919 land reform.79 Their position, as
discussed, was greatly enhanced by the Nazis’ arrival. Then, in the wake of
war, their fortunes changed radically yet again. For a period after the war
ended, they were on the receiving end of violence. They were mistreated,
expropriated, placed in camps, even murdered. The blood drinker of Danube
Swabian telling was a vampire: a predator; a fearsome, transgressive extractor; a product of local culture that distilled disembodied and generalized
anxieties and displaced guilt. She was also an irremediable composite of
reality, memory and fantasy—an unkillable, lurking enemy who infects by
telling and confessing and biting, and whose crazed desires can be slaked
only by consuming her victims, by taking things away.
For an overwhelmingly Catholic population, it may have been especially meaningful that this unkillable enemy could not properly perform
the sacrament of reconciliation.80 Blood drinking obviously has connections to “the history of sacrificial blood”—but in Banat Swabian tales it
indicated perversion.81 Abandoned by God, the Partisan’s confession of
sins led not to his absolution but to increased depravity—a heightened
desire to drink Swabian blood. Partisans, who Swabians claimed had seen
themselves as “gods” during the war, were cursed thereafter, reduced to
a state of parasitism, inhumanity, and disease—and yet they remained
terrifying fiends just the same.
I said above that blood drinkers were products of “local,” not “German,” or “Swabian” culture. Despite profound tensions between Swabians
and their neighbors during and after the war, despite tremendous ethnic,
religious, linguistic, political and social diversity, the Banat remained, as it
had been, a world of shared ideas.82 Indeed, Danube Swabians and Serbs
seem equally to have believed in blood drinkers and held each other respon95
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Monica Black
sible for their appearance. Swabians claimed that their Serbian neighbors
blamed Partisan fever on the “fascists.” It was the fascists, Serbs said, who
taught the Partisans to drink blood. A Swabian woman claimed that her
Serbian neighbor, Stoja Miložowic [sic], had told her, “very seriously,” that
the fascists put their people’s [Serbs’] blood in jars and stored it in
their pantries. They drank it to make themselves strong. New settlers
[those who replaced the departed Swabians] found the jars in their
houses and had to throw them all away, they found them so disgusting. She told me once, you see, you Swabians drank the blood of our
people, like was said in the newspaper during the war.83
Two other Swabians explained, “The Serbs—the communists and the
Partisans—tell sometimes that they got [Partisan fever] from the Germans.
[The Germans] tried something out on them, some kind of secret medicine
and that’s what caused them to get it. They say this because they alone
have the sickness and no one else.”84 In other words, both Swabians and
Serbs thought someone was drinking blood, even if they had their own
ideas about whose and why.
Like the vampire and the gun-toting, castrating Partisan wench, blood
stored in jars may also have been part of background knowledge. As Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia has described, at the end of the sixteenth century, for
a variety of reasons, the blood libel began to decline in the core lands of
the Holy Roman Empire. Narratives of ritual murder migrated eastward.
As the stories moved, the coherence of ritual murder discourse, such as
had once existed, began to disintegrate. Dissonant motifs began to appear
in stories about ritual murder “as fragments that did not quite add up to
a coherent whole.” One of these elements was the collecting of blood in
jars.85 Perhaps this narrative element bears some connection to the bloodfilled jars that allegedly stocked the kitchens of the Banat. In a marginal
note in one of his files, Karasek tried to rationalize the idea, stating that
what had been believed by Serbs and Swabians alike to be blood in jars
was probably nothing more than preserved tomatoes.86 The issue is not
whether or not blood was stored in Balkan pantries, but how stories and
elements of stories travel from place to place and acquire new life in new
settings, become meaningful in new ways, explain new problems.
Vampires, komitadjis, blood in jars, the confession of sins; armed
women who subverted the gender order by committing violence against
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Expellees Tell Tales
men—all belonged to a local world shaped simultaneously and equally
by historical experience and by shared knowledge and lore, which in turn
influenced Swabian encounters with Partisan fever. Stories move, and they
change as they move. Local history, myths and memories shape experiences
and interpretations of events, just as experience structures what can be
known and how it can be known. There is no disputing whether or not
Swabians encountered Partisans during and after the war who exhibited
frightening symptoms. Some Partisans, in the throes of illness, behaved
violently, hurling themselves to the ground and shooting at invisible enemies,
as was attested not just by Swabians but also by doctors like Paul Parin.
In the course of these episodes, some Partisans may well have cried out
for German or Swabian blood. The point is that what Swabians knew of
these behaviors and encounters was shaped by a local epistemology formed
(among other things) through collective memories of violence in two World
Wars, ideas about blood and blood drinking (religious, folkloric, Nazi)
and self-justifying ideas about what “proper warfare” entailed. Stories of
Partisan blood drinkers among Danube Swabians were meaningful because
they explained things, how things were, how they got to be that way and
what it meant. They were warnings about the possibility of terrible harm,
and about having escaped harm. They were also the way Danube Swabians
narrated their experiences in World War II and thereafter. When they sat
with Karasek and told him tales of ravening, bloodthirsty “wolves” who
foamed at the mouth, they told of their great anxieties, losses, and the
inversion of their former lives.

fantasies and the legacies of violence
Whether or not Partisans were vampires, they were monsters. As Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen writes, monsters are the “embodiment of difference,”
breakers of categories.87 They are hybrid creatures, weirdly human and yet
terrifyingly other. They are abjectly wrong, unseemly, unnatural, anathema.
When the monster’s practices replicate “ours,” those practices become
demonic, unholy. The Partisan was a monster because she inverted the
gender and the military order: she carried a gun, fought in the woods
and behaved violently, biting and even castrating her victims; yet she was
neither a man nor a “proper” soldier. Drinking the blood present in the
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Monica Black
Eucharist was an act of worship in mass; drinking Schwabenblut a fiendish
perversion. Making one’s confession could absolve the sinner or burden
him with even more guilt. Many witnesses of Partisan fever linked the
affliction and the desire to drink blood to “godlessness,” or claimed that
the sickness was the “mark of Cain for … the atrocious, bloody deeds [Bluttaten]” of the Partisans.88 Cain, the original monster, had wickedly slain
his own brother and become the embodiment of evil walking the earth,
cursed by God and marked as such for all eternity. By making Partisans
into Cain, Swabians became Abel, the sacrificial lamb, the first martyr.
The language and images of Christian martyrdom suffuse the tales in the
Karasek archive, and there are dozens of stories about apparitions of the
Virgin Mary. In many of these tales, Partisans are depicted as cursed by
God, people to whom the divine would not reveal itself because they were
communists and did not believe. Historians have shown that a tendency
among Germans to Christianize their suffering was commonplace after
World War II.89 We should hardly expect it to be otherwise: Christianity
had provided the core narratives through which Europeans understood
the world for centuries. But the story of Cain and Abel and the language
of martyrdom and the monstrous also helped expellees describe the shock
of inversion, a dramatic reversal of fortunes. By talking about how God
would avenge himself upon evil, vampire Partisans for the shedding of
innocent blood, expellees affirmed that he was on their side—the right side.
Monsters simultaneously embody social anxieties and form the discourse in which people talk about those anxieties. Each time the monster
reappears, he or she becomes something new and specific—expressing
the anxieties of that moment. But monsters are not just terrifying, and
they are not just embodiments of anxiety. They are also ridiculous: “the
thundering giant becomes the bumbling giant.”90 Women Partisans were
monstrous, inhuman fiends and they were frail and deserving of mockery.
By telling about terrifying Partisans brought low by an affliction that
debilitated their minds and bodies and turned them into voracious, yet
sickly, predators, Swabians domesticated their anxieties and experienced
a proximate form of revenge for their losses, a surrogate form of power
in their powerlessness.
Whether of the farcical or horrifying variety, monsters are not created from whole cloth. They are constructed through a recombination

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Expellees Tell Tales
of known representations. “[W]hat nourished fantasies [about Partisans
who drank blood]?” Utz Jeggle asked.
Surely [they were not created] out of nothing. Rather, the material
… came from an external source; [while] the texture … was internal.
In this sense, historical legends expand upon the stuff of reality in a
way that is not conscious in every instance, and indeed is probably
buried in the unconscious, precisely because it is so appalling. Just
as the dreamer’s imagination gives birth to wolves, murderers and
all kinds of monsters, it is also conceivable that in these tales there
adheres not only the injustices one has suffered, but also fantasies
of crimes one has committed.
Partisan symptoms of insanity—foaming at the mouth, indications of
possession—Utz Jeggle argued, should be read and understood as expressions of terror spawned both by real violence and by fantasies and anxieties
about Swabians’ own guilt or crimes or transgressions committed by their
group. It goes without saying, perhaps, that stories about Partisan cruelty
and blood drinking and references to God’s vengeance and biblical justice
excluded all discussion of German aggression and violence in the Balkans
during World War II. It excluded mass killings of Jews, Serbs, Sinti, Roma
and anyone else the Wehrmacht decided was in league with the Partisans.
The fact that most Banat Swabian leaders had thrown their lot in with the
Nazis was also excluded from narratives about Partisan blood drinkers.
In the Karasek collection, there are stories in which, as Jeggle points out,
expellees talk about the graves they had to leave behind being desecrated
in their absence, the gravestones in their cemeteries being used to build
swimming pools, the gold being extracted from the teeth of their abandoned dead. Of course, in one way or another, all of these acts are known
to have been perpetrated by the Nazis against their victims, particularly the
Jews. Given evidence of this kind, Jeggle concludes, Partisan blood drinker
tales are an instance of the return of the repressed. They are manifestations of transference, in a psychoanalytic sense, a way of coping with the
psychological dissonance provoked by myriad acts of violence, disgrace,
horror and unspeakable acts—committed and endured.91
Some historians bristle at this kind of explanation. Some are reticent
about bringing psychology (let alone monsters) to bear on analyses of the
past. Almost reflexively, historians worry about anachronism or about
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Monica Black
applying supposedly universalist models of mind to people in unique historical settings. We worry, too, about the political implications of imputing
irrational motivations to past actors or about what it might mean actually
to take the irrational in history seriously. Moreover, if the self, subjectivity
and reality are constructed through social practices, language, discourse
and culture, what good does it do us to talk about such “individual” feelings as guilt?92 But surely when confronted with the kinds of evidence
we have seen in this essay, we need a robust way of looking at historical
experience, one that takes not just history, memory and “context,” into
account, but also feelings, fantasies and monsters. We need a history that
dips into both folklore and the unconscious.
Stories about vampire Partisans were local stories, made from indigenous knowledge. They took their shape from Swabians’ collective memories
of war, their legends and religious practices surrounding blood, as well as
prevailing, contemporary standards about who was a proper soldier and
who was not and about how women should act, the effects of violence on
their psychology, and what was natural and unnatural behavior for them.
But Partisan vampire stories were also about profound bodily insecurity
and the possibility of disintegration; they were about repressed guilt, fears
of annihilation—particularly masculine annihilation—and the dissolution
of a community and its place in the world. Those stories were formed
from relationships, in the village or the neighborhood, and the histories,
hierarchies, grievances, estrangements, injustices and dread of those relationships. We can hardly expect the cultural history of violence in the
wake of a war of such fantastic, apocalyptic and pathological dimensions
as World War II—a war that unleashed so many wild demons—to come
down to us in the unadorned language of the crop report or the bank
statement. This is why human beings have stories, why expellees tell tales.

Notes
I am very grateful for the financial support provided by an NEH Summer Stipend
and a Richard M. Hunt Fellowship from the American Council on Germany, which
made the initial research for this article possible. Early versions of the article were
presented at the “Beyond the Racial State” conference at Indiana University (2009)
and at the 2010 meetings of the American Historical Association and the German

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Expellees Tell Tales
Studies Association. I would like to thank Benita Blessing, Ellen Boucher, Erik
Butler, Alon Confino, Edward Dickinson, Geoffrey Giles, Matthew Gillis, Amanda
Hobson, Michelle Moyd, Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, Sara Sewell, and Richard
Wetzell. I am especially grateful to Eric Kurlander, who read the entire text when it
was nearing completion and offered wonderfully clarifying comments. I also thank
Michael Prosser of the Johannes-Künzig-Institut für ostdeutsche Volkskunde in
Freiburg for his gracious assistance. For their absolutely essential comments and
suggestions, I thank both of the readers. Ben Shepherd, who is the very model of
scholarly generosity, I thank particularly. His advice was indispensible.
1. A “Tito Youth,” in Kladanj in Bosnia, according to Peter Schneider, originally
of St. Hubert, Yugoslavian Banat, 1951. Archives of the Johannes-Künzig-Institut
für ostdeutsche Volkskunde, Freiburg, Sammlung Karasek, Neue Sagenbildung
(hereafter JKI/SK/NS), 04/02-126. (All translations are mine unless otherwise
indicated.)
2. Throughout the essay, I capitalize “partisan” only when referring to Tito’s
Partisans. The Banat is bounded by the Danube, Tisza and Mures Rivers; once part
of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Habsburg Empire, it is today split between
Serbia, Romania and Hungary. The term Danube Swabian came into use in the
1920s to distinguish ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia from other ethnic-German
groups who had been subjects of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty
of Trianon. Zoran Janjetović, Between Hitler and Tito: The Disappearance of the
Vojvodina Germans (Belgrade: n.p., 2000), 10. In my research, Danube Swabians
mostly referred to themselves as Swabians (Schwaben) or Germans (Deutsche). The
standard survey of the German minority in Yugoslavia is Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
Nationalitätenpolitik in Jugoslawien: Die deutsche Minderheit, 1918–1978 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980). A brief synopsis of the Banat Germans’
history is Željko Šević, “The Unfortunate Minority Group: Yugoslavia’s Banat
Germans,” in Stefan Wolff, ed., German Minorities in Europe: Identity and Cultural Belonging (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 143–63. See also Ingomar Senz,
Die Donauschwaben (Munich: Langen Müller, 1994); and Norbert Spannenberger,
“Yugoslawien,” in Walter Siegler, ed., Die Vertriebenen vor der Vertreibung. Die
Heimatländer der deutschen Vertriebenen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Strukturen,
Entwicklungen, Erfahrung. Teil 2 (Munich: iudicium verlag, 1999), 865–937.
3. Michael Prosser, “Zum Wandel der Funktion und des Traditionwertes von
Sagen-Texten: Ein exemplarischer Problemaufriss aus der ‘Sammlung Karasek,’”
Jahrbuch für europäische Ethnologie 3, no. 2 (2007): 45. The Sammlung Karasek
is housed in the Johannes-Künzig-Institut für ostdeutsche Volkskunde in Freiburg
(see n. 1 above).

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4. The extent to which Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans should be regarded as
refugees or expellees—that is, the extent to which they fled or were evacuated
from Yugoslavia during or just after World War II or whether they were forcibly
expelled—is a subject of controversy. See G. C. Paikert, The Danube Swabians:
German Populations in Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia and Hitler’s Impact
on Their Patterns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967); Zoran Janjetović, “Die
Politik gegenüber der deutschen Minderheit Jugoslawiens im Jahrzehnt nach dem
Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Walter Engel, ed., Kulturraum Banat: Deutsche Kultur in
einer europäischen Vielvölkerregion (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2007), 167–76, and idem,
“Von offiziöser Darstellung zum offnen Dialog: Die Geschichtsschreibung über
die Volksdeutschen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien und heutigen Serbien-Montenegro
im Spiegel der letzten 60 Jahre,” Spiegelungen: Zeitschrift für deutsche Kultur und
Geschichte Südosteuropas 1 (2008): 30–39. In refugee circles, Janjetović points out,
Yugoslavia’s Germans are invariably referred to as having been expelled. See Zoran
Janjetović, “The Disappearance of the Germans from Yugoslavia: Expulsion or
Emigration?” Revue des études sud-est européennes 40 (2002): 216.
5. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-10 and 04/01-2. There are many such tales in Karasek’s
files.
6. On postwar retribution, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since
1945 (London: Penguin, 2005), 41–62; István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony
Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent:
Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 212–37. For an analytic
reconsideration of the postwar years as a history of the “aftermath,” focusing on
how “individuals and groups managed … experiences of violence during the war”
and after, see Frank Biess, “Introduction,” in idem and Robert G. Moeller, eds.,
Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe (New
York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 1–10; here, 2.
7. Theodor Schieder, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus
Ost-Mitteleuropa, vol. 5, Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Jugoslawien (Bonn: Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte, 1961), 88E.
8. Paikert, The Danube Swabians, 286, 288–89. Yugoslavian Germans exempt
from expropriation were those who had fought in the National Liberation Movement, were married to Slavs or other non-German citizens, or had otherwise
proven themselves to be loyal to the Titoist movement. Paikert writes, “such
Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans] were insignificantly few” (289). He states that
Germans in Yugoslavia were stripped of their citizenship and made “stateless and
outlaws” (286). In fact, they were not deprived of their citizenship wholesale
as was true in some other East European countries after the war. See Schieder,
Dokumentation, 5:104E.

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9. Schieder, Dokumentation, 5:90E–97E.
10. Paikert, The Danube Swabians, 286–87. In a single camp at Rudolfsgnad
for example, out of a total internee population of around 33,000, approximately
one third of Swabians died between October 1945 and March 1948. Deaths in
the camps were exacerbated by typhus, malnutrition and abuse. See Schieder, ed.,
Dokumentation, 5:108E–109E. Šević gives a different estimate, arguing that it
“can be assumed that ten to fifteen thousand people died in the camps,” though
his source for this figure is unclear (“The Unfortunate Minority Group,” 154).
11. Paikert, The Danube Swabians, 288, 287.
12.	For complications involved in this process, see Janjetović, “Die Politik,”
esp. 168–71.
13.	For a select but substantial bibliography of the (mostly German-language)
literature, divided by topic, see Andreas Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der
Deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich: Siedler Vlg., 2008), 397–419. See also
the essays in Rainer Schulze, ed., with Reinhard Rohde and Rainer Voss, Zwischen
Heimat und Zuhause: Deutsche Vertriebene in (West-) Deutschland 1945–2000
(Osnabrück: secolo Vlg., 2001).
14. Though there is a considerable historical literature on rumor (see n. 17
below), we do not yet have a broad or systematic consideration of its role and
significance in World War II and its immediate aftermath. Marie Bonaparte’s fascinating Myths of War (London: Imago Publishing, 1947) is one early example.
Sandra Ott, “Good Tongues, Bad Tongues: Denunciation, Rumor and Revenge
in the French Basque Country, 1943–1945,” History & Anthropology 17, no.1
(March 2006): 57–72, looks at rumor as a form of social retaliation and punishment for moral treachery under German occupation.
15. Utz Jeggle, “Sagen und Verbrechen,” in Rainer Schulze, Doris von der BrelieLewien, and Helga Grebing, eds., Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in der westdeutschen
Nachkriegsgeschichte: Bilanzierung der Forschung und Perspektiven für die künftige
Forschungsarbeit (Hildesheim: Verlag August Lax, 1987), 202. A recent example
was provided by the rumors that abounded after more than 300 tornados swept
through large swaths of the southern US in 2011: that the draining of local ponds
had uncovered dozens of dead bodies, that people were walking over corpses on
their way to local stores and that a local mayor had ordered police and firefighters
to shoot every dog they came across. None of this was remotely true. See “This
American Life, Act Five. Wednesday, Tuscaloosa, AL,” http://www.thisamericanlife.
org/radio-archives/episode/434/transcript (accessed March 15, 2012). For an
analysis of postwar “legend-creation” with reference to the Karasek archive, see
Heinke M. Kalinke, “Gerüchte, Prophezeiungen und Wunder: Zur Konjunktur
sagenhafter Erzählungen in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit,” in Elisabeth Fendl,
ed., Zur Ikonographie des Heimwehs: Erinnerungskultur von Heimatvertriebenen,

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Monica Black
Schriftenreihe des Johannes Künzig Instituts (Freiburg: Johannes-Künzig-Institut
für Ostdeutsche Volkskunde, 2001).
16. Jeggle, “Sagen und Verbrechen,” 202–5.
17. Many scholars treat rumor as a historically and culturally situated mode of
discourse, an idiom in which people describe the world. See, for example, Arlette
Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics
before the French Revolution, trans. Claudia Mieville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in
Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and S. A. Smith,
“Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of ‘Superstitious’ Rumors in
the People’s Republic of China, 1961–1965,” American Historical Review 111,
no. 2 (2006): 405–27.
18. The estimate of 15 million is taken from Gerhard Reichling, Die deutschen
Vertriebenen in Zahlen. Umsiedler, Verschleppte, Vertriebene, Aussiedler (Bonn:
Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen, 1986), 28–32.
19. Schieder, ed., Dokumentation.
20. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal
Republic of Germany (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), 51–87. On the Documentation project more generally, see Matthias Beer,
“Im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Zeitgeschichte: Das Großforschungsprojekt
‘Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa,’” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46, no. 3 (1998): 345–89.
21. A few examples include: Johannes Kaps, ed., Die Tragödie Schlesiens 1945/46
in Dokumenten, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Erzbistums Breslau (Munich:
Verlag “Christ Unterwegs,” 1952/3); idem, ed., The Martyrdom and Heroism
of the Women of East Germany: An Excerpt from the Silesian Passion 1945–1946
(Munich: Verlag “Christ Unterwegs,” 1955); and Leopold Rohrbacher, Ein
Volk—ausgelöscht: Die Ausrottung des Donauschwabentums in Jugoslawien in den
Jahren von 1944 bis 1948 (Salzburg: Forschungsinstitut für Fragen der Heimatlosen,
n.d.).
22. Karasek is sometimes also referred to as Karasek-Langer (Langer was his
mother’s maiden name). Though his early publications are attributed to “Alfred
Karasek,” he began at a certain point to add the name Langer to clarify his ethnicity, as he was frequently mistaken for a Czech. On this point and for a brief (and
highly selective) biography, see Walter Kuhn, “Das Lebenswerk Alfred Karaseks
(1902–1970),” Jahrbuch für ostdeutsche Volkskunde 13 (1970): 326. Karasek’s
lifetime output was enormous. See Alfons Perlick, “Alfred Karasek. Eine Biographie
und Bibliographie,” Jahrbuch für ostdeutsche Volkskunde 9 (1965): 195–238. On
Karasek’s fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s, see Heinke M. Kalinke, “‘Teamwork:
Zur volkskundlichen Feldforschung in Ost- und Südosteuropa,” Jahrbuch für

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Expellees Tell Tales
deutsche und osteuropäische Volkskunde 42 (1999): 20–43. On the role of Karasek
and researchers like him in shaping an explicitly ethnocentric folklore during the
Third Reich, see Michael Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Politik? Die “Volksdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften” von 1931-1945
(Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999).
23. Perlick, “Alfred Karasek,” 229–38.
24. Helmut Höge, “Schafft zwei, drei, viele Vietnam,” http://blogs.taz.de/
hausmeisterblog/2006/08/15/ (accessed June 10, 2012).
25. Paul Parin, “Die Kriegsneurose der Jugoslawen,” Schweizer Archiv für
Neurologie und Psychiatrie 61 (1948): 303. Parin’s memories of his time with
the partisans are the subject of his book“Es ist Krieg und wir gehen hin”: Bei den
jugoslawischen Partisanen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991) .
26. Parin, “Kriegsneurose,” 303–4.
27. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-119.
28. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 90.
29. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-116; A. K. Gauß, “Der Übel größtes aber ist die
Schuld: Die Partisanenseuche in Jugoslawien,” Neuland (Salzburg), September
3, 1950, 3.
30. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-117.
31. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-129.
32. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-131.
33. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-118.
34. Scholars have discussed this topic from many perspectives and with respect to
a variety of wartime experiences. See Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs
and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006), esp. 43–69; Lothar Kettenacker, ed. Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue
Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–45 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003); Gilad Margailt,
Guilt, Suffering, and Memory: Germany Remembers Its Dead of World War II, trans.
Haim Watzman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010),
46–53; Moeller, War Stories; Bill Niven, Germans as Victims: Remembering the
Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian 2006); Mary
Nolan, “Air Wars, Memory Wars,” Central European History 38, no. 1 (March
2005): 7–40.
35.	For a very concise and helpful overview of this landscape, see Klaus Schmider,
“Foreword,” in Ben Shepherd and Juliette Pattinson, eds., War in a Twilight
World: Partisan and Anti-Partisan Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1939–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 181–88. See also Ben Shepherd, Terror in the Balkans:
German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012); Tomislav Dulić, “Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia

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Monica Black
and Herzegovina, 1941–42” (Ph.D. diss., University of Uppsala, 2005); Thomas
Casagrande, Die volksdeutsche SS-Division “Prinz Eugen”: Die Banater Schwaben
und die national-sozialistischen Kriegsverbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2003);
Klaus Schmider, Partisanenkrieg in Jugoslawien, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Mittler,
2002); Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist judenfrei”: Militärische Besatzungspolitik
und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993).
36. Schmider, Partisanenkrieg, 71.
37. Gaj Trifkovic, “A Case of Failed Counter-Insurgency: Anti-Partisan Operations in Yugoslavia, 1943,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 24, no. 2 (2011):
336.
38. Valdis O. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and
the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993), 232–34; Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in
Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 648–49. Not all Banat Germans qualified as members of the
Volksgemeinschaft; some were considered ethnically “too mixed” (say, with Serbs)
to qualify as “politically reliable.” Casagrande, Die volksdeutsche SS-Division, 181.
39. Casagrande, Die volksdeutsche SS-Division, 177–78.
40. Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD Amt IV, September 26, 1941,
U.S. National Archives T-175, film 233; Der Bevollm. Kommandierende General
in Serbien, Abt. Qu., Merkblatt für die wirtschaftliche Nutzung des Gebietes
zw. Save und Drina, n.d. (assumed to be September 28, 1941), BundesarchivMilitärarchiv 4/72332, 5365/7, 1022-1023. I thank Ben Shepherd enormously
for these references. See also Schmider, Partisanenkrieg, 69–73; Shepherd, Terror in the Balkans, 125; and Ben Shepherd, “Bloodier than Böhme: The 342nd
Infantry Division in Serbia, 1941,” in idem and Pattinson, eds., War in a Twilight
World, 195–97.
41. Casagrande, Die volksdeutsche SS-Division, 299.
42. Ibid., 300; Tomasevic, War and Revolution, 201–9.
43. Nicholas Stargardt writes that World War II was an event “without precedence
or sequel,” and marked by “greater extremities of emotional experience, subjective identification, and personal commitment than many a ‘heroic’ age, like the
Reformation or great European revolutions, whose intensity historians have long
accepted was capable of remaking … the social consciousness of all protagonists.”
Stargardt, “Rumours of Revenge in the Second World War,” in Belinda Davis,
Thomas Lindenberger and Michael Wildt, eds., Alltag, Erfahrung, Eigensinn:
Historisch-Anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2008), 386.
44. Akiko Shimizu, Die deutsche Okkupation des serbischen Banats 1941–1944 unter
besondere Berücksichtigung der deutschen Volksgruppe in Jugoslawien (Regensburg:
Regensburger Schriften aus Philosophie, Politik, Gesellschaft und Geschichte,

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Expellees Tell Tales
2000), 113–14. Blood as an instrument of imperial conquest is also a theme in
Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–97.
45. Jonathan E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg
Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43, 47.
46. Ibid., 29.
47. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 94–139.
48. Ben Shepherd, “With the Devil in Titoland: A Wehrmacht Anti-Partisan
Division in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1943,” War in History 16, no. 1 (2009): 82; idem,
“Bloodier than Böhme,” 191; idem, Terror in the Balkans, chap. 6; Manoshek,
Serbien ist judenfrei; idem, “The Extermination Policies of the Jews in Serbia,” in
Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 163–85; idem,
“‘Coming Along to Shoot Some Jews?’ The Destruction of the Jews in Serbia,”
in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., War of Extermination: The German
Military in World War II (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 39–54, esp. 42–43.
49. During the Balkan Wars, Serbs engaged in mass rapes of Muslim women,
massacred prisoners of war, destroyed villages, and committed “pillage, arsons, and
executions.” See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing
in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 135–37; Rudolf
Jeřábek, Potiorek: General im Schatten von Sarajevo (Vienna: Verlag Styria, 1991),
162–65.
50. Shepherd, “Bloodier than Böhme,” 191; Manoshek, Serbien ist judenfrei,
places particular importance on the role of anti-Slavic feeling in the formulation
of anti-partisan policy in the Wehrmacht.
51. Shepherd, “With the Devil in Titoland,” 95.
52. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-121.
53. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-122.
54. Arguments concerning the role of racism in motivating mass killing by
the Wehrmacht in Yugoslavia and elsewhere have become increasingly nuanced.
See Jonathan Gumz, “Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia,
1941–1942,” Historical Journal 44, no. 4 (December 2001); Alexander Korb,
“Integrated Warfare? The Germans and the Ustaša Massacres: Syrmia 1942,” in
Shepherd and Pattinson, eds., War in a Twilight World, 210–32; and Shepherd,
“Bloodier than Böhme.”
55. Gumz, Resurrection, 49–50. Holger H. Herwig also notes in a more general sense that “public morale” in Austria-Hungary “was maintained in part by a
steady stream of atrocity stories—later published in two Red Books—concerning
Serbian ritual murder of Austrian women and children.” See Herwig, The First

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Monica Black
World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London: Arnold, 1997),
273.
56. Hermann Frank Meyer, Blutiges Edelweiß: Die 1. Gebirgs-Division im Zweiten
Weltkrieg (Berlin: Ch. Links Vlg., 2008), 124-5; Richard West, Tito and the Rise
and Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 146.
57. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-119.
58. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-122.
59. Gumz, Resurrection, 38.
60. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans.
Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 70, 74, 76
(emphasis in original). My attention was drawn to thinking about the Flintenweib
by Robert Gewarth and John Horne, “Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in
Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 3
(September 2011): 502.
61. Erich F. Berendt, Soldaten der Freiheit: Ein Parolebuch des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: E.C. Etthofen Vlg., 1935), 89. Cited in Theweleit, Male Fantasies,
1:76.
62. Barbara Wiesinger, Partisaninnen: Widerstand in Jugoslawien, 1941–1945
(Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 39–40, says that the numbers of women fighters were
quite variable, but could comprise 5–15% in some divisions.
63. Gumz, Resurrection, 50–51.
64. Marc Bloch, cited in Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 111.
65. Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,”
Revue de Synthèse historique 33 (1921): 41–57; Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life
in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111–12. Both cited
in Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 91. The theme of bodily violation may
be especially likely to emerge in times of crisis and war. See Karl-Heinz Mistele,
“Kriegsgerüchte,” in Klaus Guth and Thomas Korth, eds., Lebendige Volkskultur:
Festgabe für Elisabeth Roth zum 60. Geburtstag (Bamberg: Meisenbach, 1980).
66. Jeffrey Freedman, Poisoned Chalice (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002), 33.
67. Meyer, Blutiges Edelweiß, 124–25.
68. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York:
Basic Books, 2010).
69. White, Speaking with Vampires.
70. Ruth Rogaski, “Vampires in Plague-Land: Multiple Meanings of Weisheng
in Manchuria,” in Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth, eds., Health and
Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 132–59.
71. Ibid., 141.

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72. I thank an anonymous reader of this piece for making me aware of this very
important point.
73. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-136.
74. Butler, Metamorphoses, 28.
75. Ibid., 29, 28.
76. Butler refers to the vampire’s “representational syncretism” (ibid., 190).
Other recent literature I found especially helpful on the subject of central Europe
and its vampires includes: Christian Kättlitz, “‘…Man braucht also nicht nur
auf dem Balkan zu suchen.’ Oder: Wie slawisch darf Dracula sein? Lewin, Glatz
und die Entslawisierung eines böhmischen Vampirs – ein Beispiel für modernen
Mythentransfer und seine Motive,” Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur
der böhmischen Länder 50, no. 2 (2010): 333–50; Thomas M. Bohn, “Vampirismus
in Österreich und Preussen: Von der Entdeckung einer Seuche zum Narrativ der
Gegenkolonisation,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 56:2 (2008): 161–77,
and idem, “Der Dracula-Mythos. Osteuropäischer Volksglaube und westeuropäische
Klischees,” Historische Anthropologie 14 (2006): 391–409; Heiko Haumann,
“Dracula und die Vampire Osteuropas: Zur Entstehung eines Mythos,” Zeitschrift
für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde 1 (2005): 1–17; Katharina M. Wilson, “The
History of the Word ‘Vampire,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, no. 4 (1985):
577–83. For a general account of vampire lore in Yugoslavia, see E. Schneeweis,
Serbocroatische Volkskunde: Erster Teil: Volksglaube und Volksbrauch (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1961).
77. “In predominantly Slavic Orthodox settings,” Bruce McClelland notes,
“the way in which a vampire may come into being is always an unnatural or violent
death.” It was the contact of “Eastern European vampire beliefs with Western
witchcraft beliefs … that germinate[d] the notion that vampires, like witches
and sorcerers, can themselves bring other vampires into existence.” See Bruce
McClelland, Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 90. For further elucidation on
the question of “who becomes a vampire?” see Dagmar Burkhart, Kulturraum
Balkan: Studien zur Volkskunde und Literatur Südosteuropas (Berlin: Dietrich
Reimer Vlg., 1989), 70.
78. White, Speaking with Vampires, 5.
79. Senz, Die Donauschwaben, 81.
80. Roman Catholicism was the religion of more than 75% of Danube Swabians.
Anthony Komjathy and Rebecca Stockwell, German Minorities and the Third Reich:
Ethnic Germans in East Central Europe between the Wars (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1980), 126.
81. Gábor Klaniczay, “The Decline of Witches and the Rise of Vampires,”
in Darren Oldridge, ed., The Witchcraft Reader, 1st ed. (London: Routledge,

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Monica Black
2002), 394. Originally published in Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power:
The Transformations of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
82. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Zur Interethnik: Donauschwaben, Siebenbürger
Sachsen und ihre Nachbarn (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1978).
83. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-127.
84. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-121.
85. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 204.
86. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-127.
87. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), esp. vii–xiii and 3–25.
88. JKI/SK/NS, 04/02-115.
89. Biess, Homecomings; Moeller, War Stories.
90. Cohen, Monster Theory, 18.
91. Jeggle, “Sagen und Verbrechen,” 205–6.
92. Lynn Hunt offers an excellent overview of these themes in “Psychology,
Psychoanalysis, and Historical Thought,” in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds.,
A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002),
337–56. I have also been influenced on this point by Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and
the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994).

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