Hrvatski bog Mars

In the collection “The Croatian God Mars”, Miroslav Krleža, through seven powerful short stories, depicts war from the perspective of ordinary home guards – hungry, exhausted and lost in a system that does not recognize their humanity or voice. Instead of heroism, war appears as a cold, bureaucratized mechanism that grinds people down due to wrong orders, ideological blindness and national myths.

Each short story opens up a different aspect of this experience: the hospital hell in Barrack Five Be, the grotesque mobilization in Three Home Guards, the mindless slaughter of the Battle of Bistrica Lesna, the fate of ordinary soldiers who die without knowing why. Symbolically, the “Croatian God Mars” represents the bloody anti-deity of war who rules over the province that unconditionally serves another empire.

Krleža’s style is sharp, sarcastic and deeply compassionate: he denounces militarism and moral illusions, but does not condemn people – only the system that pushes them to ruin. That is why The Croatian God Mars remained one of the strongest anti-war works of Croatian literature, brutally honest and tragically recognizable even outside the historical framework in which it was created.