Slavonsko ratno pismo: Monografija

Rem analyses around 230 texts – diary entries, testimonies, documentary prose, war diaries, feuilletons, reports and literary fragments – written under conditions of siege, shelling and exodus (Osijek, Vukovar, Vinkovci, Slavonski Brod, Županja, Đakovo, etc.). The book is not an anthology, but a critical monograph: it classifies genres (diary, testimony, memoir), explores motives (fear, resistance, loss, patriotism, trauma), language (a mixture of literary and colloquial, archaic and contemporary) and the function of writing as a "private gesture" – the only possible resistance in chaos.

Rem emphasises that Slavonian war writing is not uniformly heroic; it is heterogeneous, intimate, sometimes raw – reflecting the "poetics of noise" (as in the later anthology), where the voices of marginalised people, civilians and intellectuals struggle against silence and oblivion. The book is a pioneering work on regional war literature – important for understanding how Slavonia, as the hardest-hit area, responded to violence through text.

It is valued in Croatian literary historiography as a foundation for later anthologies (e.g. Rem's "Poetics of Noise", 2010) and research on the Homeland War in literature. Rem shows that war writing is not just a document – ​​it is also a way of surviving the soul in war.