Slobodan Snajder

Slobodan Šnajder was a Croatian playwright, novelist, essayist, and publicist whose work kept asking what a nation does with a history it would rather fold away. He was born on 8 July 1948 in Zagreb. His father, Đuro Šnajder, was a poet and writer of German origin. His mother, Zdenka, was a partisan. In 1942, barely 18, she suffered atrocities at the Ustasha camp in Nova Gradiška. After Stalingrad his father was forcibly mobilised into Waffen-SS formations, escaped a military hospital with a Polish bullet in his shoulder and the help of a Polish underground fighter, and spent the rest of the war as a civilian on a bicycle. When the two met again in 1945, she was in an Ozna uniform and he stood on the other side of the war. Šnajder later said that if they had met at the front they would have had to cancel each other. Instead that impossible meeting became the grain of Doba mjedi (The Brass Age), the family saga that made him a European novelist in his late sixties.

His parents divorced early. His mother won a hard custody fight over him and his sister. His father then almost vanished from his childhood and returned in his gymnasium years. He grew up on the edge of Zagreb, in a settlement that was no longer a village and not yet a city, in a female household with his mother and his grandmother Marija. Her son, his uncle, was sent from Jasenovac to Mauthausen and was killed on the last day of the war in May 1945. A candle burned for him in front of a Partisan memorial. In 1971, when he asked his grandmother what they actually were, Croats or Serbs, she answered with a line he would carry into his books: "Save me God from Serbian heroism and Croatian culture." He liked football, cheered for Dinamo, and was taken into the stadium by adult fans. He later said he was a wild son of many men, because his own father was mostly absent until high school.

He studied pure philosophy and English at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. He remembered a gymnasium whose teachers he still honoured, including a Croatian teacher who gave him Crnjanski and then Krleža. He read his early work to the class and said he was vain and needed an audience. In 1968 he was a University of Zagreb delegate to the Belgrade student protests, part of the Praxis circle and the Korčula Summer School, where he sat near Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, and Jürgen Habermas. He later said the regime looked old to that generation, a revolution shunting like a locomotive in a secondary yard, and that he thought better of Tito after the collapse of that project than he had in 1968. He said recent Croatian history, for him, began in 1968, not in 1971.

He published stories, essays, and plays from 1966. He co-founded and long edited the theatre journal Prolog and edited editions for the publisher Cekade. His first professional staging was Minigolf in 1968 at what is now Gavella. Kamov, smrtopis followed at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1978, directed by Ljubiša Ristić. Držićev san was staged there in 1980, also by Ristić.

The play that made his name, and that never sat easily at home, was Hrvatski Faust (Croatian Faust). It opened at the Split Summer Festival in 1982, directed by Dino Radojević, then at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade under Slobodan Unkovski, where it became a long-running success. It won the Branko Gavella prize that year. In 1987 Roberto Ciulli staged it at Theater an der Ruhr and played it about a hundred times across Germany, Europe, and the United States. Hans Hollmann directed it at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1993. It was never performed at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, the house for which he said it was written. He called that absence a taboo that survived the breakup of the country and continued under an opposite user manual. The play puts an actor playing Faust under Ustasha occupation and asks how an actor becomes an intellectual.

Through the 1990s he was pushed out of Croatian theatre. A signal from the culture ministry under Franjo Tuđman told him to leave. He went to Germany, which he called an elective homeland and also a difficult lover. His plays travelled from Ireland to Israel while they were hardly played at home. Other widely played texts included Zmijin svlak, Utjeha sjevernih mora, Nevjesta od vjetra, Ines & Denise, Peto evanđelje, Kosti u kamenu, Enciklopedija izgubljenog vremena, and Kako je Dunda spasila domovinu. A sentence about Archbishop Stepinac, that the archbishop had trouble aligning the principles of his faith with reality, cost him the intendancy of the Rijeka theatre Ivan pl. Zajc. He said that truth was worth an intendancy. From January to June 1993 he wrote the column Početnica za melankolike in Glas Slavonije. From 1994 to 2013 he wrote Opasne veze in Rijeka's Novi list. Later columns appeared on Telegram. He was a member of the advisory board of the left-wing magazine Novi Plamen. He was a frequent voice on the Third Programme of Croatian Radio.

From 2001 to 2004, while Ivica Račan was prime minister, he directed Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM). He said he staged more Croatian drama there than any director before or after him, then had to leave over repertoire. For the last fifteen years or so he turned to prose, because a novel needs a reader, not a theatre director, a state budget, or a lighting designer. Morendo appeared in 2012. Doba mjedi (2015) was the return. It won the Meša Selimović, Mirko Kovač, Radomir Konstantinović, Kočićevo pero, and tportal awards in 2016, was translated into German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Slovenian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and English, and sold about 14,000 copies in Dutch as De reparatie van de wereld. The English The Brass Age, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, appeared in 2024. Anđeo nestajanja (The Angel of Disappearance, 2023), about the stubborn partisan Anđa Berilo and Goli Otok, took him eight years. He finished a third novel, Mara Leib, centred on his grandmother, before he died. Fraktura was preparing it for October 2026.

He called himself a leftist by conviction and refused to be packaged as one. "I never decided to be declared as an apricot compote," he told CorD in March 2024. He thought better of Tito in old age than in 1968, because of Tito's break with Stalin, while still letting his novel voice Anđa Berilo raise his generation's objections. He said that if a state's worth is the happiness of its citizens, there was more of that happiness in Yugoslavia than later, and that Yugoslavia was far from ideal. He signed the 2017 Declaration on the Common Language among the first, and said no politics and no state stood behind it, only a clear and scientifically based view. He disdained a political class that, in his view, had turned public money toward its own companies. He quoted Walter Benjamin: hope is given to us only for the sake of those without hope. He told CorD he had received threats that described his killing in detail, and that he did not immediately go to the police.

Croatian Wikipedia lists his wife as Kruna Tarle, a theatre and visual artist. She staged his puppet text Moja draga Tilla in 2010 with Zagreb Puppet Theatre and Berlin's HfS Ernst Busch. Their daughter Tena Šnajder is a journalist and writer. Readers and family called him Šac. In March 2024 he told CorD he had three grandchildren. He also spoke of a heart-risk gene inherited from his father, who died of a myocardial infarction. The year of that death is not stated in the sources used. In a later 2024 podcast he described the small unnamed island where he lived, in central Dalmatia, as a kind of end of the world, with six winter residents, of whom he was the youngest. He went to Zagreb only when he had to. He died in Zagreb on 30 August 2026, aged 78. Croatian notices that say he died "u 79. godini" mean the 79th year of life, which matches age 78. The cause of death was not made public. His daughter Tena announced the death and said the last months had been a race to finish the book, almost without leaving his room, without eating or sleeping. That account is not a medical cause. A farewell was held at the Zagreb crematorium on 3 September 2026. Rade Šerbedžija spoke. Further burial details were not made public. He left a body of work that treated literature as one of the last rooms where a suppressed truth can still be said aloud.