ZAGREB, Croatia — As he does in many countries, Bob Dylan enjoys a great reputation in Croatia. In 2008 and 2010, he gave concerts here that received excellent reviews and publicity. But some of his Croatian fans are saddened, even outraged, that their musical idol expressed himself carelessly in describing their country’s historically fraught relationship with neighboring Serbia.

In an interview last year, Rolling Stone quoted Mr. Dylan as saying: “Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery — that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

While some of Mr. Dylan’s defenders say that he was referring to the ethnic violence of the 1990s that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, most observers saw in Mr. Dylan’s comments a reference to Croatian leaders’ collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. Following complaints by the Croatian community in France, Paris prosecutors opened an investigation this month into whether Mr. Dylan could be charged with “incitement to hatred.”

For centuries, Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after World War I, it joined the new Yugoslavia. During World War II, the Germans and Italians installed a puppet state in Croatia and Bosnia, ruled by the Ustasha, a group of Croatian fascists whose genocidal violence — against Serbs, Jews, Roma and political opponents — was comparable to the Nazis’.