Why couldn't my dad get married in 1940's Yugoslavia?

May 11, 2009 8:24 AM

FamilyHistoryFilter: In Tito's Yugoslavia, in the latter half of the 1940's, what nationalities would two people have to have been to be denied permission to marry, and why?

There's very little I know about my father's side of the family. A few of the things that I do know are: my father grew up in Slavonija (then Yugoslavia, now Croatia), between Osijek and the Hungarian border. His father was Austrian, his mother Yugoslav. His first child from his first marriage was born out of wedlock, because he and his first wife were not allowed to marry under Tito's regime.

My father died several years ago, and the only living memory left of that time is my great-aunt, who is now 91 years old and has the memory one would expect of someone that age. I'm trying to piece together what I can of my family history and ancestry, but it's difficult without having some basic facts. One thing I've heard a couple of times over the course of my life was that because of their nationalities, my father and his first wife couldn't get married in Yugoslavia, and had to wait until they left the country. If my father's parents were Austrian and Yugoslav, what ethnicity would his future wife have to have been in order for them to be denied the right to marry? Why was this done, and were there other ethnic groups who were in the same situation?

Both straight-up answers and directions to resources welcomed.

posted by the luke parker fiasco to society & culture (9 comments total)

uh Yugoslavia was a made up couuntry. Comprised of Serbian, Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians etc. I'm sure i missed some.

No one is really a "Yugoslav." Can you trace the history of your last name?
posted by Max Power at 8:44 AM on May 11

Jewish? That would be my first guess.
posted by Oktober at 9:00 AM on May 11

Do you know exactly the date? I mean, it matters a great deal if this was pre-1945, or post-1945, for obvious reasons. I read your question and immediately thought that the 'problem' was not ethnic, but religious. Yugoslavia was a mix a Catholic, Orthdox, and Muslim, as much as it was a mix of ethnicities.

This paper talks about interethnic marriage, and makes it clear that prior to 1945 all marriages were religious, and hence there would have been obvious difficulties if your father and hist first wife were from different religions. After that, there seems to have been a good level of mixing, and no obvious reason why the marriage couldn't have gone ahead.

My only other idea is that they were too young to get married without parents' consent (less than 21?) and she was from an undesirable group, such as the Roma, or possibly Bosniak. Surnames should tell you more, if you know them.

Hope these ideas are helpful.
posted by Sova at 9:04 AM on May 11

It could be that the prohibition on marriage wasn't a law as much as it was a custom-- the relationship was taboo for some reason.
posted by Electrius at 9:10 AM on May 11

Oh, just a little more, if she was Roma, then the denial of marriage could have been a result of her lacking citizenship/birth documents. They were in a pretty bad position at the time, and were lately victims of the Holocaust, in which tens of thousands died. There was obviously a lot of prejudice against them.
posted by Sova at 9:10 AM on May 11

Max Power: Sorry ... I think I was implying that my paternal grandmother was Croat, as that's where they were living (she was born in Feričanci, and her family/maiden name is Fey), but didn't come out and say it clearly.

Sova: Thanks for the link; it looks like pretty interesting reading. I can't speak to certainty what religion his first wife was, as she's not my mother, but my father's side was Catholic and he and his wife raised their children Catholic, and I never heard anything which would indicate that they were a mixed-religion couple.
As for the date ... my father was born in 1928, and if I'm recalling correctly their first child was born in 1945. I know it wasn't a parental consent issue. AND I don't know his wife's family/maiden name.

I know all this is terribly vague. My father never spoke about his childhood, and I came to feel that it wasn't something I had the right to ask him about. Now, of course, I realise it's part of my heritage as well, but nearly all of the principal actors are gone, making it much more difficult to piece things together.
posted by the luke parker fiasco at 9:17 AM on May 11

Hmm, 1945 could be before the end of the war, do you know where the child was born? Was it in Croatia? You might have to read about Yugoslavia under Nazi occupation/control (specifically Croatia) to get an idea of the kind of racial and ethnic problems and divsions. Try searching for Ustase marriage laws.

I found: Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood.

Again, hope that fits in with your time frame and proves useful.
posted by Sova at 9:37 AM on May 11

Well, to attempt to answer the question and to dispel some odd notions . . .

1) There certainly are "Yugoslavs" as a kind of ethnic group. Essentially, there's not much difference between Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims except for the place they live, their religion and the history their ancestors experienced. That is to say, their bloodlines are basically the same. Someone is a "Serb" if they see themselves as one (and this really has to do with the religion of their ancestors, Serbian Orthodoxy) or "Serbian" if they live in Serbia. The same goes for Croats / Croatians, just substitute Catholicism and Croatia for Serbian and Serbia. One could be a Serbian Croat, or a Croatian Serb. The Bosnian Muslim thing is a bit weirder, since we don't lay claim to "Bosnian" in the same way that Catholics claim "Croatian" and Orthodox followers claim "Serbian." Bosnian Muslims (of "Bosniaks") are people, generally descended from Serb / Croat landholders, who converted to Islam for tax advantages offered by the Ottomans. Go back earlier for another "artificial" split into Serbs and Croats. One can be a Bosnian Serb or a Bosnian Croat, too. So it's pretty confusing. But their have always been mixed-marriages, and many people - myself included - are aware of mixed ancestry going back centuries . . . far enough that the people involved weren't really followers of any monotheistic religion. I'm oversimplifying, but essentially these tags are political / state / religious ones, not "ethnic" ones. One of the problems in the past century is that wars caused people to have to "choose." But many people don't actually know enough about their ancestry to know what people they are, and these people and their families have always considered themselves ethnically Yugoslav . . . even prior to the establishment of Yugoslavia. (Often you would see people struggle with these "new" designations, describing themselves as such things as "Orthodox Serbian Croats" (meaning a person of Croatian descent, living in Serbia and following the Serbian religion) or "Catholic Bosniak Serbians," which would presumably be someone who is of Muslim descent, follows the Catholic religion and lives in Serbia. The war compelled people to these absurd (and pretty meaningless and usually imagined) designations, because one couldn't claim to be "Yugoslav" in any sense other than as a political statement. But those people are/were ethnically Yugoslav.

The "new" ethnicities go back centuries, but under Tito, many people had no idea what they were at all and hadn't ever (especially in multi-cultural places like Sarajevo.) They were, to themselves and reality, Yugoslavs.

2) Jews, no way. Roma, no way. It was simply too late for them to have been involved, unless your grandparents married when they were pre-pubescent (which is when laws would have prevented it and the Jews and Roma were still around.) Your grandfather would have been 13 in 1941, by which time such unions would have been unthinkable. This situation continued until mid-1944 (give or take, depending on when the Partisans freed that part of Yugoslavia.)

3) And if it truly were under Tito, marrying a Rom or Jew would have been fine anyway - although that clearly wasn't it anyway, as I've mentioned. There may have been lingering resentment by Tito of the Serbs in certain areas, as the Partisans often did battle with Chetnik forces (Serbs who initially were anti-Nazi resistance fighters and then began collaborating instead, and fighting Tito's partisans.) But that's a stretch; after some trials of some Chetnik and Croatian collaborators, Tito erased most of the country's divisions and was enormously popular everywhere (for a time, at least.) I've never heard of laws enacted to "punish" one "ethnic" group or another - Tito was savvy enough to avoid that.

4) The bottom line? I think you're looking at this backwards. The obvious "wrong" ethnicity here is Austrian. Thus, your grandfather. Resentment towards anyone of German descent was huge, and Tito's then-heavy alliance with Stalin only reinforced that. As an Austrian national, it's very easy to understand why your grandfather would be denied the right to marry a Yugoslav citizen, at that juncture in time.

5) This paper talks about interethnic marriage, and makes it clear that prior to 1945 all marriages were religious, and hence there would have been obvious difficulties if your father and hist first wife were from different religions.

I just scanned this, but that doesn't appear to be what it says. More importantly, it simply isn't true. Both sets of my grandparents were married prior to 1945 in civil ceremonies. I think what the paper implies is that religious marriages lost its legal status in 1945 (which is true) . . . but there were always civil unions, too, even prior to 1945. What people do still today is go down to the courthouse with four or five people and get married. Later that day (or week), they have a "religious" wedding, which most people - sentimentally - consider the "real" wedding. But legally, it isn't.

My only other idea is that they were too young to get married without parents' consent (less than 21?) and she was from an undesirable group, such as the Roma, or possibly Bosniak. Surnames should tell you more, if you know them.

Back then? You'd have been an ancient spinster at 21! The age of consent for marriage was generally 14. With parental permission, it may have been as low as 12. The joke today is STILL that the age of consent is "when you're old enough to reach the doorknob." In fact, it's perfectly legal in much of the former Yugoslavia for a 65 year-old man to have sex with a 14 year-old girl.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 5:19 PM on May 11 [4 favorites has favorites]

While on the one hand it's incredibly confusing, Dee, on the other hand this makes a lot of sense. I think my father was about 17 when the first kid was born, and I'd imagine that it was easier for his Austrian father and Croatian mother to get married in the 1920's. I'd always looked at it as his wife being some ethnic mix/background that was the problem, but it sounds like it was his Austrian blood that did it. Which also makes sense, because eventually they left Yugoslavia for Austria (I believe my father went to high school in Graz) because things got too difficult for them. They also had difficulties in Austria for not being real Austrians (it's reminding me a bit of the Székely here in Romania), which is how they ended up in the States.
posted by the luke parker fiasco at 2:57 AM on May 12