War Memory and Education in A Fragmented Society The Case of Yugoslavia

\ War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia
Wolfgang Hoepken
I, War, Memory, and Education in the Balkans
il)
pean societies. Some specific conditions in Balkan culture and his tory, however, may have favored a particularly intensive reference to wars in the collective historical consciousness through public knowledge, and historical education in this part of Europe. Cul tural anthropologists, for example, have argued that a particular understanding of time in Balkan societies, one that does not dis tinguish between former and present historical periods, has shown 3 remarkable persistence up to the present. This has kept former events (especially wars) alive and has promoted a historical mem 4 ory that centers around wars. So it is that the strong tradition of typical of Balkan societies, with their pref patriarchial ethics erence for militant virtues and heroism, has been held responsi ble for the prominent place that war has occupied in both the individual and the collective historical identities of the Balkans. From the perspective of a historian, another feature of Balkan history may explain the war-centered historical memory that is peculiar to this region: namely, the fact that almost all Balkan nationstates were the immediate product of wars. While Charles Tilly is
certainly correct in writing that all over Europe war wove the 5 network of national states, this circumstance nevertheless has particular relevance for modern Balkan history. From the emer gence of national states following Ottoman rule during the nine teenth century to the youngest nation-states arising from the
3. Joel M. Halpern, Interpreting the Pastlone Perspective and Social History, .btuthu ethnologica 3 (1991): 8599; Ivan Colovic. Die Erneuerung des Verg.sngenen. 7eit und Raum in dee zeitgenhssisclsen politischen Mvthologie, in Nen,sd Stefanov and Michael \Verz, eds., Bosnien und Europa. Do Ethnoicrung der Gcscilschaft (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 90103; and Klaus Roth, Zeit, Gcschichtlicbkeit und \ofkskultur irn post ur 1 sozialistischen Sddostcuropa, Zettschrzfr , Balkanologie 31: 1 l995): 3145. 4. While these anthropological approaches of for inspiring insights into the cultural dimeis sions of historical memory and may help to explain, for example, the prominent place of such historical events as the Battle of Kisovo in 1389 in todays historical culture and political conflicts in Serbia, in rn. view they still need more empirical evidence. If I am interpreting the literature correctly, we still have little knowledge of the inmpaet of social change on the understanding of time in the Balkan.. Remembering old wars within the framework of present political and social contexts and conflicts does not in itself seem to be specifically Balkan. As Peter Burke put it, thete are societies with a long and a short social memory. Using Poland and lrcland as examples of societies that have a long memory, the borderline between those tso types of societies obviously does not sep arate Central Europe from the traditional patriarchal Balkan. See Peter Burke, His tory as Social Memory, in Thomas Butler, ed .,Mcmorv, Histori, Culture, and the fund (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l989, 97113. 5. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital ,sod Eur;can States (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l992.
76.
Wars everywhere have always played a major role in historical memory. Even the oldest myths and traditions deal with fight ing and killing, the German novelist Hans-Magnus Enzenberger said recently, recalling this simple but no less basic historical fact) While collective memory in premodern societies was largely based on wartime experiences, the advent of nationalism in the late eighteenth century increased the importance, the political role, and the cultural significance of war memories in societies every where, not only in the Balkans. War memorials, celebrations, ceme teries, and other symbolic, expressions of memory were not only sites of mourning, but, more important, they became the means of fostering a collective national identity; education, textbooks, 2 and public discourse all combined to remind people of the du ty of sacrificing for ones own nation by recalling former wars. The memory of war thus became a chapter in the grammar of nationalism that was written across Europe during the nineteenth century. In general, the Balkans do not differ from other parts of Europe as far as the relations among war, historical memory, and educa tion are concerned. Most of the symbols, images, and lyrics of war memories, as well as the strategies used to exploit these memories for political purposes, were more or less the same in the Balkans as elsewhere, and they were often imported from Central Euro
!. Hans Magnus Enzenherger,Ausszchten au/den Burgerkrzeg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Edi tiOn, 1996), 9. 2. Jay Winter, Sires of A!ernor,s Sites 0/Mourning: The Great Xr in European Cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.
190
East
0 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies Furopcan Politics md Societies, Volume 13, No. I, Winter 959
East European Politics and Societies
191
bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans can be taken as a striking example of Norbert Eliass statement that nationstates were made out of wars and for wars. This immediate link 6 between wars and the birth of the nation-state has, of course, had tremendous consequences for the collective memory in Balkan societies. More than anyplace else, perhaps, remembering the war in this part of Europe has always meant remembering the emer gence of ones own nation. From the beginning, therefore, the memory of wars has been a particularly attractive instrument for the strategy of nationbuilding in the Balkanssomething that tainly has favored the tradition of mythbuilding and the glori fication of military violence. As elsewhere in Europe, education in the Balkans, especially dur ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, played a crucial role in fostering a national identity that relied heavily on the mem ory of warfare and violent upheavals. In particulat the wars and revolts against the Ottoman Empire stood at the center of a col lective memory that the young Balkan national states promoted in textbooks, school programs, and through the formation of a pub lic historical culture. Wars, whether victorious or lost, were used 7 by state authorities not just to strengthen national identity but also to transmit officially desired social values and virtues. The tradi tional patriarchal ethos of heroism in Balkan societies thus merged with the modern nationalist demand for sacrihec in favor of the nation as one of the main objectives of education. 8 The basic principles of education, undisputed during the nine6. Norbert Flias. Die Gesellschaft der Individuen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Editinn, 1987). 276. 7. On the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century textbooks and education in Bulgaria see Mariji Radeva, Uebnicite po bulgarska istoria (18791930) i vuspitavaneto na nacionalni uvstva i nacionalno suznanie, Goddnik em .Sofijskija univerzitet Kliment OLhridsk:j. Jszoriieskifakultet 75 (1982): 88123; for Greek textbooks, esp. Christina Koulouri, Dimensions zdeologiques de lhistorzcit en Grece 1834 1914. Les snanuels sco laires dhictoire et de geographic (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991): Christina Koulouri, Eth nika stercotipa ke Elliniki ethniki tantotita sto scholeio ton l9on eond, .4fteroma ston panepistimiako dhasskalo Vass. VI. Efnrocra (Athens, 1992), 323341; Constantin Angelopsulos and Christina Koulouri, Lidentitl nationale grccque: Mtamorphoses
teenth and early twentieth centuries, were hardly questioned dur ing the interwar period. Even the shock waves of the Great War of 191418, which in this part of the European war theater had affected civilians much more than the military, did little to change the Balkan societies attitude toward the memory of war in edu cation. Among the intellectual public in the interwar Balkans there were traces of a pacifist discourse but they never really influenced the political culture of their societies and did little to alter the gen eral acceptance of war as a legitimate expression of politics. The new experience of industrialized mass killing during the First World War did indeed change the image of war in the public con sciousness and in textbooks by adding the aspect of suffering 9 to the idealized picture presented in former decades. The pre dominant objectives of education, however, remained intact: To show the legitimacy of war to fulfill national interests and to pre sent wars as examples from the past of how to behave and how to defend those national interests. Measures designed to eliminate bel ligerent nationalist principles of historical education, as counseled by the League of Nations or such nongovernmental organizations as the Carnegie Foundation, were adopted in the Balkans as reluc tandy as elsewhere in Europe. In looking at Bulgarian interwar textbooks, a Carnegie-sponsored analysis of European textbooks in 1925 came to the conclusion that although textbooks in Bul garia refrained from describing emotions of revenge and did not even show many of the tragic aspects of warfare, they nonethe t less reflected an csprit helliqueux. The memory of wars in the public consciousness and in the educational system after the First \Vorld War, therefore, did not change character and did not lose the instrumental role that it had played in previous decades as a tool for national identity management.
uslovisna (Belgrade: Ph.D. liloiofski fakultetInstitut sa pshiologiiu, 195 manuscript, 8286; and Olga Maniiilos il, Koncentricni krugose pamenja, scents tradicija i istorija, Tokovi rstori/e 1-2 (1996: 91103. 9. For a case study of how the First \Vorld War ss as perceived by the public, see Olga ManojloviC, Tradicije Prvog svetskog rca u Beogradskoj yavnostz 19181941 (Belgrade University: MA. thesis. 1996). Manuscript. 10. Dotation Carnegie pour Ia Paix Intci nationales, Direction des relations at lCducation, Enquete surles livres scolaires dopers gus ire, vol. 1 (Paris, 1923): for other Balkan coun tries; ibid., vol. 2 (Paris, 1925).
az 1 )ugo Union Before 1914 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). 8. As an example of the promotion of patriotism in popular literature in early-twentieth-
1830 1996. Etude des manuels scolaires grecs dhistoire, de geographic et de lecture, Internatunale Schulbuchforschung-Jnternatzonal Textbook Research 18 (1996): 323350. For Serbi.sn textbooks, see Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalism: Textbooks and the
century Serbia, see Biljana Trebjetanin, IszholoCk, sadrlaj i miocipatriotizma u savre
192
War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
193
The Second World War has had a fundamental impact on the memory of war in Central Europe. After Hiroshima and Ausch witz, the earlier commemorative efforts simply could not be duplicated, Jay Winter said recently in summarizing the changes that have been made. Education has followed this process over 11 time in most Central European states by reducing the depiction of war-related events in the history curricula, by purging textbooks of belligerent terminology, and by encouraging efforts toward peace education. These changes, however, had fewer repercus sions in Balkan societies, where a war-centered historical educa tion stubbornly persisted. The depiction of the nineteenth-century anti-Ottoman wars was left more or less untouched in most of the Balkan states, and military conflicts there remained heroic national liberation wars. Particularly in socialist countries where the rul ing communist parties began to look for a greater national legiti macy (since the late l960s in Bulgaria, for example, and especially in Romania), these bourgeoisie-led wars, even under the condi tions of socialist education, kept their reputations as the best tra ditions in national history and as integral parts of the peoples historical identity. But outside the socialist Balkan countries as 12 well (in Greece, for example), the educational system (at least until the late I was to a considerable degree devoted to the topic 70s) 9 of war as part of the concept of history. This practice was criti cized by Greek historians and educational experts time and again as ethnocentric, even though many schools had refrained from using the worst stereotypical textbooks that had been common in former decades. 3
11. Winter. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 9. 12. For Bulgaria, see Mil2o Lalkov, Vuprosite na balkanskata istorija v kursa go obita i bulgarska istorija na srednite uilita, Vekove 4(1973); 6871. In the late 1950s and earls I 960s, Johp Georgeoff recognized a much more Soviet-centered than nationcentered quality in the Bulgarian texthooks.John Geurgeoff. Nationalism in the His tory Textbooks of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, Comparative Education Review (October 1966); 44250. For other Balkan countries, Wolfgang Hopken, ed., Oil on FireOl
ins Finer? Textbooks, Ethnic Stereotypes and Violence in South-Eastern Europe Scl,ulhucher ethnjscl,e Stereotypen und Gewalt in Sdosteuropa (Hannover: Hahn,
1996). 13. Herkules Millas, History Textbooks in Greece and lurker. History Workshop 31
While the nineteenth-century wars against the Ottoman Empire could be remembered in education and public memory in terms of national liberation wars, in all Balkan countries the Second World War posed far more problems for the collective memory. For countries like Bulgaria and Rornania, which had been in a more or less close alliance with Germany, memories of the war posed a dilemma: Both countries had entered the war for the purpose of fulfilling their territorial dreams of becoming nation-states. In the case of Bulgaria, joining Germany was just another attempt to achieve the so-called San Stefano Bulgaria, including Macedonia, Thrace, and other territories referred to as Bulgarian soil. In the case of Romania, participation in the war on the German side was motivated by the hope of reestablishing the Romania Marc (Greater Romania) of 1918. While these territorial aims were con sidered to be legitimated even by the communist successor states, the Second World War, at the same time, had to be remembered as the political adventure of a native fascist bourgeoisie, and each countrys defeat in the war had to be praised as the birth of a new political order. Since the 1960s, education and academic liistoriog raphy in both countries have therefore found it hard to bring the two competing memories into accord, appearing always to produce a somewhat hybrid picture of the official war memory. Coming to terms with the past, howevem was even more difficult and painful in those Balkan countries where the Second World War had not only been a fight against foreign aggressors but also a civil war, as was the case in Greece and, particularly, Yugoslavia. In these countries, different memories of war met each other in conflicts of memories, to use a phrase by Peter Burke conflicts of memories that were difficult to appease if they could be made a topic of discourse at all, in Greece, for example, for more than two decades the memory of the civil war remained a matter of political strife, and it was even longer before it became a legit imate topic of educational discourse. Until the early 1980s, the subject was excluded from the curriculum in order to avoid per petuating memories of war among the young generation. As a
A Comparative European Survey on 1-liseorical Consciousness and Politzcal ,-lttttudes Among Adolescents, vol. A: Descsiptiosi. (Hamburg: Krher-Foundation, 1997). 3D6.
(Autumn 1991), 2133: Nikos Achlis, I ghitoniki snas wulghari ke turki sos scholika wivila istorias ghmnasiou he likeiou (lhessaloniki, 1983); Ana Frangoudaki, I ta anagh nostika ssiwl,a tou dhinoe,kou scholezon (Athens, 1979); Ana Frangoudaki and Thalia Drsgonas. Greece, in Magne Angvik and Bodo von Boerries. eds.. Youth and History:
194
XVar, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
195
result, as the Greek textbook analyst Irene Lagani said recently, Many Greeks are ignorant of one of the most significant chap ters in their modern history, one which to a large degree deter mined the fate of modern Greece. 14 Even more difficult and, judging from recent events, more dis astrous in its consequences, was the problem of remembering the Second World War in Yugoslavia, which will be used as a case study in the following pages to demonstrate our problems. I shall begin by examining how socialist Yugoslavia dealt with the problem of remembering the Second World War; I will then deal with the role that the public memory of war played in the process of the coun trys disintegration, and, finally, I will look at the current prob lems of war memory and education in the post-Yugoslav states.
U. Remembering the War Under Socialism: Education and Public Knowledge in Titos Yugoslavia
For obvious reasons, the memory of the Second World War played a crucial role in public knowledge and education in Titos Yugoslavia. For example, as far as its function in producing legit imacy for the Party was concerned, this role was probably even more important for the Yugoslav Party than the memory of the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union was for the Communist Party. Remembering the war, therefore, was a matter of a wide-ranging and sophisticated policy of memory. It was a major subject of academic historiography; museums, research institutes, and jour nals were actively engaged in the professional production of war memories. The war was present in public in a dense and largely uniform net of lieux de mmoire; in socialist Yugoslavia almost all symbolic forms of historical memory, such as memorials or official holidays, were dedicated to the memory of the war. Po litical institutions like the Union of Fighters in the Peoples Lib
14. Irene Lagani, The Presentation of Wars in I listory Textbooks in Greece in Wolf gang Hpken, ed., Oil on FireOl ins freuer? 231; Mark Mazower, The Cold War and the Appropriation of Mensory: Greece After Liberation, East European Politics and Societies 9:2 (1992): 27294. For a study of how the memory of the civil war and also one of the anti-Ottoman wars still influences the social community, see Anna Collard, Investigating Social Memory in a Greek Context, in Eli,abeth Ionkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity (New York: 1989), 89103.
eration War (SUBOR) were not just veterans organizations hut played the role of memory watchdogs. Offending the memory of the National Liberation War could lead to an accusation in court of political crime. And last but not least, schools and universi ties had to transmit this memory and turn it into loyality for the Party and the political order. Charles S. Maicrs comment that too much memory is not so much an example of a societys confidence 15 in history as it is evidence of that societys fear of political change also aptly describes the situation in Titos Yugoslavia. Producing legitimacy for the ruling Communist Party and cre ating a common identity among the population were the main objectives of this memory. As for the Partys claim of a monop oly of political power and the existence of a common Yugoslav state, both were deduced from the wartime experience. It was hoped that remembering the common fight and suffering during the war would help to create consensus in a society that was bur dened not only by extreme ethnic, cultural, and religious frag mentation but also by the unfavorable experiences of living together in one state. Memory, therefore, was an important instru ment of integration and stability in a fragile regime, which, apart from the ideology of Yugoslav socialism and an uneven and un stable economic prosperity, had little to offer to a common iden tity. Therefore, what had to be remembered and what ought to be forgotten depended most of all on the Partys strategy of identity management. Recalling the past was seen less as a discoursein the sense of Theodor Adornos Aufarbeiten der Vergangenheit and 1 (coming to terms with the past) more as remembering a more or less ready-made and unchangeable picture of the war. This authorized picture was a rather homogeneous one that showed little interest in the ambivalence of history. Its narrative was structured exclusively around the role of the communist par tisans, whose political, military, and moral superiority over all other domestic and foreign actors had to be demonstrated. In this mem ory, all strategies and options other than those of the Communist Party were presented either as historically illegitimate or were sim
15. Charles S. Maier, A Surfeit of Memory, History and Mernon 5 (1993): 50, 16. Theodor W Adorno, Was bedeuted Aufarheitung der Vergangenheit?, Kulturkrs tile und Gesellsclaaft, uol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Fdition, 1977): 555.
196
197
ply ignored. The role of the noncommunist forces, the partisans opponents (the Chetniks, for example, or even those who were of communist but non-Titoist persuasions, like the Croatian Party and the Partisan leader Andrija Hebrang) appeared in this mem ory only from the perspective of condemnation. Other problems, such as questioning the partisans use of violence and the suffer ing of their victims, were taboo and banned from the official mem ory. Academic historiography had little room to maneuver in dealing with the Second World War. Despite rather late but undis putable progress in professionalization, historians of the war did little to break up the limits of the official memory. Escaping from the authorized scheme of description and evaluation usually ended up in some form of Party interference. And although historians, already loyal to the Party during the Tito era, expressed concern about the weaknesses and the omissions of war bistoriography from time to time, the general frame of interpretative patterns, as well as the taboos, remained more or less stable until the end of the Tito era. History under the influence of ideology had to praise 17 brotherhood and unity, socialist patriotism, self-management socialism; it had to glorify the partisan Yugoslavia. Each attempt to research from a different perspective and critically prove those ideological approaches was either forbidden or qualified as chau vinism or nationalist deviation, as historians remarked in pub lic after socialism had come to an cnd) Education was bound even more strictly by the tenets of this official memory. School programs, textbooks, and teaching at all levels and in all subjects had to give priority to the transmission
17. Ivo Banac, Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia, Amer ican Historical Review 97:4 (1992): 10831104; Wolfgang llpken, Von der Mythol ogisierung zur Stigmatisierung Krieg und Revolution, in EvaSchmidt-Hartmann, ed.,
19 of ideological and so-called patriotic values. And, while the socalled selfmanagement socialism was the means of transmitting the ideological values, the Second World War was the main exam ple used to illustrate the patriotic ones. Textbooks were never really freed from this task in ally of the Yugoslav republics. Few sub stantial changes took place in the picture of the war as presented in the schools, at least not between the 1950s and the late 1970s. The (limited) progress in academic historiography bad an even more limited impact on textbooks and teaching. For example. the concurrent, cautious attempts in academic historiography to open a discussion on mistakes in partisan politics did not touch upon sensitive issues and found no reflection in education. In view
of the increasing autonomy the Yugoslav republics gained begin ning in the early 1970s, it is even more surprising how little the
picture of the war differed among the textbooks in the individ ual republics. With almost all educational policies in the hands of the republics, their texhooks nevertheless remained little more than the local version of an undisputed all-Yugoslav paradigm 23 of interpretation. Federalism therefore had remarkably little impact on the picture of tile Second World War that appeared in textbooks and, in this aspect at least, education differed from aca demics where the federalization of the state that began in the late 1960s did influence bistoriography s;gmficantly and, time and again, led to bitter discussions among historians from various republics. Tile Second World War obviously had the same inevi
table significance for all of tile republican Communist Parties as a source of political iegtimacy forcing them to hold a particu larly strong hand on this topic in education. The way in which the memory of the Second World War was presented in school duritg the Tito era had a number of short19. Diana Plut etal., Vrednosni sistem osnovnoko1skih dugbeniko, Psiholoska istrazi vanja 4 (1990): 141204; and Ru2ica Rosandi and Vesna Peti, edt., RatniPvo, p.519
time is Ljubodrad Dinsil, Od tvrdnje do znanja. Prilog istorili istoriograulje o Jugoslaviji u raw 19411945, Vojnoistorijski Glasnik 12 (1996): 199214; and Mile B;clajac, Pregled novije jugoslovenske istoriografi je o pokretu Dragoljuba Mihajlovila i gradjanskom ratu, in Peter Radan, ed., Draza Mihajlovic (1893-1946): Ftjiy Years After His Death (Sydney: Serbian Studies Foundation, 1996), 7994. 18. Branko Petranovil, Istorirar z sasremena epocha (Beograd: Novinsko-izdavalka ustanova Vojska, 1994), 142.
Jugoslawien 9411948 im Spiegel von Gcschichtswisenschaft und historischer Pub lizistik, in Kommunismus und Osteuropa. Konzepte, Perspektzven und Interpretatzo nen im Wandel (Munich: Oldenhourg, 1994), 165201. Critical on the development of Yugoslav war historiograph. but in my view still overestimating its progress over
otizam, patrijarhalnost (Beorad: Centar za antiratnu akciu, 1994. 3954. 20. As Carol Lilly has shown, quarrels about textbooks appeared rather early between the republics and central state institutions, even during tise period of strong central ism in the late 1940s. Carol Lilly, Problems of Persuasion: Communist Agitation and Propaganda in Post-War Yugoslas is, 19441948, Slavtc Review 53:2 (l994: 395l3. These debates were obviously conflicts over decision-niaking resources but hsd little impact on the patterns of dcccripticin and interpretatton which in most part remaineJ uniform in their basic assumptions.
198
Wai Mernon, and Education in a Fragmented Society
199
interpretations. Three of these consequences are of particular importance to me, at least from the perspective of developments following Titos death. The first one is the description of the war based on a strictly dualistic, even Manichaean, portrait. While even academic historians since the 1 970s have slowly begun to present a somewhat more sophisticated picture of the partisans oppo nents and the noncommunist actors during the war (without, however, changing their basic evaluations), textbooks have adhered to a dogmatically simplified dichotomy of revolution aries (i.e., the partisans) and counterrevolutionaries (ranging
from Croatian Ustaa and Serhian Chetniks to native quislings and the bourgeois government in exile), reserving not just polit ical legitimacy but also the good virtues and ethics only for the so-called revolutionaries. A second shortcoming of the picture presented in the classroom
comings and consequences that went beyond dubious and biased
ethnic violence and
war
22 crimes, leaving out, of course, the ques
tion of partisan violence, which reached considerable proportions toward the end of the war. The ethnic dimension of the war was
mentioned primarily as an underlying assumptions in schools or where public knowledge was concerned; not surprisingly, it was exactly this issue that, time and again, sparked serious controversy among historians of different ethnic backgrounds, particularly Serbs and Croats, and quickly developed into nationalist battles among historians and often lead to direct Party intervention to stop
the conflicts. This way of dealing with the war was,
and for public consumption was the tendency to dc-ct hnicize the war on Yugoslav soil. In describing the events of the war pre dominantly from a class perspective, as a war between commu nist partisans and all kinds of bourgeois, this approach succeeded in ignoring or at least downplaying both the wars ethnic dimen sion and its dimension as a civil war. These features of the war could at best be read between the lines of textbooks; they were never made an explicit topic for historical learning and public discourse. Indeed, each mention of civil var in Yugoslavia during the Sec ond World War met with resistance, criticism and condemnation, as was recognized only in the early 1990s.21 It was not so much, as Serbian critics later claimed, that a discussion of the Ustaa ter ror against the Serbs had been suppressed in the schools and in public knowledge during Titos rule. Neither was it the case, as the Croats claimed, that Croats as a nation were collectively made responsible for various war crimes. It was more an attempt to exclude all ethnic aspects from inclusion in the official memory of the war. According to the class approach, it was the bourgeoisie on all sidesSerbian, Croatian, Slovenianthat was held responsible for
21. Islirol Vaiit, Oslohodilaiki di gra]janski rat. Tokoviistorijc 12 (1993): 173. ub 1
course, intended to support the official ideology of bratstvo i jedinstuo (brotherhood and unity) and to avoid recognition of the fact that national antag onisms could be fueled by historical memories. The price for this kind of guided memory, however, was that a crucial dimension 23 of the memory of the Second World War was frozen, This had at least two consequences, which turned out to be dramatic dur ing the process of the countrys dissolution. First of all, it produced a fragmented memorya phrase that has recently been used in discussions of the historical memory of the war in German soci 24 ety but that is also appropriate to describe the situation in Titos Yugoslavia. Out of the complex character of the war in Yugoslavia as an antifascist resistance movement and a social class war, but no less as an interethnic and even intraethnic war, only one dimen sion existed in the ofhcial memory: the war as a national libera tion war and a socialist revolution as the Second World War was
of
22. The following textbooks were used during the late 70s in Serbia, Croatia, md Sb e nia: laconic n.sjnovijeg doba 70 iVnaired gunna.r:;c (Beograd, 1973; isori;a sani t jeg doba xc IVrazned gimnaxije (Beograd, 1976); lswnija xc Viii, razsrd ino or ikole (Beograd, 1976); Istons,ja xc Viii. naz red osnovne ako1e (Beograd, 1973 Pu s jest 2. Udibenik za ussnjereno obrazavanje, 3rd ed. (Zagreb, 1988): Zgods 0107 71 osmi nazred osnovnih ml (L juhljana, 1969); and Zgodovina 70 05011 taxied razsed (Ljubljana, 1976). It is interesting, but no less signifieant, that it was the Slovcnusn textbooks that offered the most information on, for example, the Jasenos ac con centration camp. The Croatian and the Serbian texts obviously wanted to as oid mak ing this topic a matter for discussion in the two republics that were the most actis:tv
involved. 23. Bette Denieh, Dismensberiiig Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies sod the S\ inbo!:: Revival of Genocide, Am lican Ethnologist 21:2 (1994: 36)C. 24. Peter Steinbach, Die Vergegenwirtigung von 1ergangenem. Zum Spannungss erhaittois von individueller Erinnerung und ffentlichem Gedenken, ,4us Poirtik nod Zc:t gcschichte 34 (1997): 313.
200
WYa, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
2D1
officially labeled in historiography and in the political language. Its characterization as a war of each against everybody was 25 largely ignored. It was therefore a highly selective memory, one that excluded parts of the society from official remembrance and produced a gap, perhaps even a conflict, between what some of the society remembered in private and what was officially remem bered in public. Second, this way of dealing with the history of the Second World War in many respects produced a vacuum of memorywhite spotsthat could be left untouched only as long as a monopoly on memory existed. The spots were easily filled by others when the Communist Party lost its monopoly on discourse and inter pretation in the late 1980s. The often cynical topic of the genocide of Serbs during the Second World War could be discussed then only because education and academic historiography had avoided an open, unrestricted discussion of this aspect of memory in former decades. Bringing it into the open ignited the political controversy between the Serbs and Croats during the countrys decline in the 1980s. Finally, there is a third crucial weakness of the official war mem ory that needs to be mentioned. The catalog of cognitive values through which the Second World War was remembered in schools and by the public reflected values that some critics have correctly called a knightly or even a belligerent, morality (vitezki rnoral or ratnzck, ?noral.) [he quantitative share of war events 26 and war descriptions found in textbooks and school programs showed the importance politicians and educational bureaucrats gave to the memory of wars. The Serbian sociologist Vesna Pei cal culated that 58 of 90 texts included in the elementary-school cur ricu lum during the 1980s dealt with wars (a large share of them with the Second World War.) About two-thirds of all personalities mentioned in these textbooks were described as war heroes, while only 25 percent came from science, culture, or politics, as Peis colleague Dijana Plut calculated. History textbooks that covered the period since 1917 also dedicated up to 50 percent of their con
25. Slubodan Ini. Jedan iii viie ratova. Tokovi istorije 12 (1993): 1371. 26. D. Plut et aL Vrednosni sistcm, 19S; R. Rosandh and V. Pe1i, Rarnistvo, 55.
tent to the events of the Second World War, with a great deal of this material concentrating explicitly on military events and the description of battles. Qualifying the cognitive values behind these descriptions in greater detail, a Belgrade-based study group in the late 1980s came to the conclusion that such values as the love of freedom (slobodoijubivost) were interpreted exclusively as free dom from foreign domination, not necessarily as freedom of the individual in the sense of the values of a civil society. Boldness (brabrost) and fighting spirit (borbenost) ranked among the top four values transmitted by textbooks. The partisans (and only they) were made the prototype of these virtues and an example of moral 27 ity for each generation. The cognitive values transmitted b this kind of war memory were, in fact, no less than the traditional patri archal values, which, especially among the Serbian population, had a deep-rooted and long tradition in pre-Yugoslav and pre-social 28 ist times. While the textbooks did not ignore the cruelty of the war and its tragic consequences for the individual, death appeared largely to be a necessary sacrifice that must be made for ones com munity. In looking at the memory of the Great War in European countries, George Mosse has argued that even the description of suffering and the tragedy of war can result in a trivialization in which 29 the acceptance of war is seen as something that is inevitable, The same argument can be made for the Yugoslav textbooks and their way of dealing with the Second World War. Communist education thus used traditional values as its cognitive basis, albeit within a new, socialist context. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what effect this kind of education and public discourse on the war had on people and their mentality. Reliable methods of measuring the influence of edu cation on historical consciousness are rare, and empirical evidence is difficult to extract. In addition, even where hard data can be col
27. As an example of a mid-197Ds history textbook that exphcitlv makes the partisan morality the basis of our socialist morality, see Istora napsoz:iicg doba za JVrazrcd gimnazije (Beograd, 1976), 117. 28. B.Trebjesanin, Patriotzam. 86f; Zagorka Golubovi, Nekeliko teza o teorijskins pret postavkama za slom Jugoslavije, RaspadJugoslav:je (Belgrade: Institut ca filozofiju i drutvenu teoriju, 1994). 3638. 29. George L. Mosse, Kriegserinnerung und Kriegbegcisterang in 2s1 van der L:nden. and G. Mergner, eds.. Krwgsfiibrnng und mentak Krrcgs:orbcreztuitg iBerlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991). 28.
202
Wa,; Memory, and Education in a Jragmented Society
203
lected, any correlation between education, historical consciousness, and political behavior is highly speculative. Simple explanations should therefore be avoided, especially with respect to Yugoslavia. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody war were not caused by historical memory or by education. However, the way in which the Second World War was remembered through education and in public knowledge may well have influenced the political events that led to the violent clashes of the early 1990s. First, there was the omissions of historical education in deal ing with the war in the classroom as well as in the general pub lic under Tito that paved the way for historical memory to be used for nationalist mobilization. The fragmented and selective memory, with all its hidden and ignored stories, left niches for subversive memories, which, under the circumstances of polit ical disintegration and economic and social crisis, were vulner able tQ manipulation. Charles jelavichs conclusion, drawn from examining nineteenth-century south-Slav textbooks, that edu cation did not prepare students to live in a common state after the irst World War, can easily be applied to the Tito period. 3 Ihe historical memory of the Second World War was never a mat 1cr (1 unrestricted discussion. Furthermore, there was never a disc iursc on how a multietli nic society whose population con sstc I of extremely divergent individual and collective memories oulcl manage this complex legacy sufficiently to come to terms with its complex past. Failings in both the political and the his torical culture proved to be a fundamental obstacle in making social memory a matter of integrating the society. The nonexis tence of a pluralist academic and public discourse in the Yugoslav society, which characterized Titoism despite its apparently lib eral elements, prevented the formation of a historical con sciousness that would block the political misuse and manipulation of history. In the end, the deficits of a rational and critical his torical memory were the price the Party had to pay for its use of the memory of the Second World War exclusively as an instrument of its legitimacy. Second, the way in which the war was memorialized through
3 . ( arlcJelavich, Nationalism as Reflected in e1xth,oks of South Slays in the 19th ( nturv, Canadian Review o[Naiiona/icm l6:1-2 (1959): 28.
education probably fostered values that contributed to familiar izing the students and the public with the phenomenon of war. War appeared as a legitimate means of defending the community. Moreover, it was presented as a source of honored values, Under Tito, the consequences of fragmented and selective memory may not have produced the aforementioned violent conflicts, hut they probably made it easier for headers to mobilize people for nation alist confrontation and ethnic violence,
III. From the Memory of War to the Outbreak of War: The Debate on the Second World War During the Yugoslav crisis (Late 1980s/Early 1990s)
The official memory of the Second World War in Titcis Yugoslavia lost its role and its sense when the state and the system this mem ory had to legitimize came under pressure during the second half of the 1980s. As in other socialist countries of Eastern Europe at this time, for the Yugoslav public historical memory became a resource for questioning the system and its ideology as well as the impetus for political change. While a stubborn Titoist party lead ership was still trying to defend the official memory by fighting an increasingly losing battle against all tendencies toward offend ing the legacy of Tito and the Peoples Liberation War, a public discourse that emancipated itself more and more front former restrictions began to develop. 1 hroughout the long process of the countrys political and economic crisis in the late 19$Os, the Party lost its control over memory and the public, opening the floor to the formerly secret stories. Writers, more than academic histo rians, were the first to embrace those topics in order to question the Communist Partys claim to historical legitimacy. The Partys Stalinist past and its policy of fierce repression, particularly dur ing the years of socialist transition in 1944 to 1948, were among the first topics to be addressed by this dissident historical dis course, proving wrong the Partys supposed platform of an anti Stalinist legacy on which Tito and the Yugoslav communists had 31 built their legitimacy during the previous forty years. Once this
-
31. Robert Hayden, Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery of \X.srtime Msssacres Jhston 0 Late and PostCommunist Yu islavia, in Ruhie Watson, ed .,Mennv,
ii:
204
Wai; Memory, and Education in a fragmented Society
205
.i9
step had been taken, it was only a matter of time before the untouchable role of Tito himself was challenged. Soon the Sec 32 ond World War would become a matter for discussion, targeting yet another issue that was crucial to the Partys legitimacy. With political controversies among the Yugoslav republics becoming more radical toward the end of the 1980s and with the search for political alternatives questioning more and more not just the countrys socialist order but the Yugoslav state itself, the histori cal discourse soon took the direction of a much more fundamen tal revision of the historical memory. With politics spurring the disintegration of Yugoslavia in favor of separate nation-states, the historical memory became increasingly nationalized. Together with the Yugoslav state, its institutions, ideology, and political order, the historical memory fragmented and disintegrated. From the outset, remembering the Second World War in this process of nationalizing memory gained particular relevance. Unlike other countries, such as Germany where the memory of the war was more in danger of losing significance and weight in public discourse, in the former Yugoslavia the memory of the war became one of the major subjects of public discussion. Both the intensity and the tone of the discussion quickly reached such a level of polemics and bitterness that some foreign observers described it as a strange obsession with history. The media played a lead 33 ing role in this forum, and historians and intellectuals took part in it, creating a historical discourse in which the borderline between academic historiography and a nonprofessional histori caijournalism rapidly began to disappear. This public debate soon went beyond scientific disputes. becoming part of the politics of ethnic confrontation itself. Before long, the memory of the Sec ond World War had turned into political capital exploited by the political elites. Both the post-Titoist, but communist, leaders (such as Slobodan Miloevi) as much as the pluralist, but nation alist, leaders (such as later Croatian president Franjo Tud iman) used
16R70. 32. Tb resolution by the intellectuals assottated with the Serhian Academy of Science to reexaniinecritically the historical role of josip BrozTito, Danas 16.8 (August 1988): 24 33. Warren Zimmerman, The Last Amha.ador, Foreign 4/fairs 74:2 (1995): 3.
Opposition Under State Socialism, (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1993),
historical memories, not just of the Second World War, to advance their own political ambitions. Just as a common memory of the war had played a central role in legitimizing the common Yugoslav state, the separate and diverging memories were now used to sup f port the policy of the countrys dissolution. The memory 0 the people for the new war that last war thus contributed to preparing was to come. The practice of reconstnlcting and (mis-)using the memory of the Second World War for political confrontations was the most intense in Serbia and Croatia. In Serbia, the memory of the war was only one aspect of a much deeper attempt to construct a new historical identity. The political background of reshaping of national identity is well known and does not need to he described in detail. During the long and painful decade of political and eco nomic crisis following Titos death and the outbreak of ethnic conflicts in Kosovo in 1981, parts of the Serbian party elite and a majority of leading Serbian intellectuals began to articulate the view that Serbia and the Serbs had been disadvantaged by the countrys federal order and the basic principles of Titos nationality poli tics. Because the Serbs were living in three republics and enjoyed only a limited sovereignty in their own republic, due to the exis tence of the two largely autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina within Serb territories, it was argued that Serbia and the Serbs had been discriminated against politically, economically, and, most of all, as a nation. The famous Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science of 1986 gave the most comprehen 4 sive view of this feeling of Serbian deprivation in Yugoslavia: Despite the fact that the memorandum did not gain official polit ical status, its basic arguments soon became a consensus among the Serbian public gaining political support when Miloevi came to power in 1987. In the context of the political discussions on Serbia and its posi tion in the former Yugoslavia, intellectuals and politicians promoted a pattern of Serbian identity that, in short, was based on a portrait of Serbian history in which Serbs had always been victimized by others, had always been in danger of physical annihilation
34. Vasilije Krestii, ed.. .lfemnrandum S,4sTU (Bclradc. I 996(.
206
Wa Al emory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
East Ewropean Politics and Societies
207
including the threat of genocideand had therefore always been forced to fight for their survival and their freedom. It was a picture that the former American ambassador William Zimmerman, frustrated by the political events during his term of office, described as the lugubrious, paranoid and Serbocentric view oi the past. to blame everybody but themselves for what ever goes wrong. This picture was most explicitly expressed 36 by Dobrica osi, the Serbian writer and a temporary Yugoslav president in whose essays and writings Serbs were almost exclu sively reduced to a fate of constant suffering and betrayal, while also to one of militant striving for freedom. This was a historical autostereotype, one that revolved around an almost sacral collective suffering but, nonetheless, included an extraor dinary heroism. The historian Radovan Samardi a widely rec ognized specialist in medieval and early modern Serbian history who was himself involved in the historiographic nationalism of the late I 9 and early I 99 expressed this historical self-image 80s 0s, in the tradition of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. As Samardi put it, the lesson the Serbs learned from history was that without death there is no resurrection, and without suffer ing and pain there is no freedom, neither individual nor collec 38 tive. Wars and military virtues played a crucial role in this historical autostereotype, becoming not only the backbone of the nations history but an integral part of the Serbian national char acter. These virtues were therefore not only a subject of myths and epic poetry but they were declared to he a principle of eth
. .
35. On historical self-image, see Ivelin Sudamov, Mandate of History: Serbian National ldenti and Ethnic Conflict in the Former ugoslavia, its John S. Micgiel, ed., State
and oition Building in East Central [urope: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Columhia Unisersitv, 1996), 1737; Wolfgang Hdpken, Geschichtc und Gewalt. Gesclsiclstsbewuf(tsein ins ugoslass nelsen Konfiikt, Internat innate Schulbuch frschung_lntcrsiatio,ial Textbook Rscarcl, 15:1 (1993): 5573; Nebojia Popov, Sipski popnhisam. Od snargmalne do iIniznantne pojs cc (Beograd, I 903), 16. A typical example of historical self-image is \ cselin Djurctit, Razaranje Srova u XX.veku
(Beograd, SANU, 1992).
37. Numcrous exansples of this can be found in Dobrica ijosii, Spskopiiasjedc,nokratsko pitan;c (Belgrade: Politika, 1992), 26, 32, 36, 39,43, 148; Dobrica Cosi, Prosnene (Novi Sad: 1)ncvnik, 1991), 221. 241. 38. Radovan Samard%id, 0 istorijsko sudbini Srbo, Zadulnna Miloia Crnjanskog: Ser bia i komentari za 1990/91 (Belgrade, 1991), 16584. For similar quotations from Samard;i)s numerous interviews an] statements during tie late SOs and early 90s, see ibid., Na ruhu istorije (Belgrade: Srpska Knjilevisa Zadruga, 1994), 191.
36. Zimmerman, The Last Ambassador, 3.
nic being, as the Serhian sociologist Nehoja Popov has noted 39 in a critique of Serbian identity. postYugoslav Serbian identity was based In the end, then, the largely on the same militant cognitive values that characterized the Tito era. But while the virtues of the Titoist regime were noneth nJ 5 nic values, symbolized by the partisans tradition in the Sec World War, they were now drawn from an apparently specific Scr bian tradition, one that went beyond the experience of the war and sharked back to medieval and premodern Serbian history. It was, as Radovan Samardi summarized it, the tradition of the so-called vitezka Srbija (the knightful Serbia) of the medieval period and of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, which through out history had made up the Serbian national character, and from which the countrys values and morals should he drawn even in 4 the present. Of course, this kind of promoted historical identity was not homogeneous even in those davs it was not endorsed by all intellectuals or by the general public, but it certainly became the predominant trend during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, moreover, it had an undisputable impact not only on politics but on education as well. It was in this largely archaic historical iden tity that the memory of the Second World \Var was embedded, turning the experience of the war into one of the most striking examples of the autostereotype of Serbian history and the Serbs, Along with the Kosovo myth, the Second World War became the most prominent topic of discourse taken up during nationalist con frontations in public and in politics in order to demonstrate the Serbs collective historical fate of suffering, physical danger, and the necessity to take up arms. Most important, the topic of the genocide of Serbs under German and Ustaa rule during the Sec ond World War became the central issue of historiographic and public discussion on the war. Many hooks, articles and scientific documentations appeared in public on the topic of genocide, very few of which really had anything to do with professional histori
39. Nehojia Popov, Traunsatologija pariqike drtavc, in
c. Popos. cd,, rata. 7iaurna I katarza u istorijskom pamCen;u (Belgrade: Rcpohlika, 1992), 8993. 40. Radovan Samard9it, Aristokratska vertikala u srpskoj istoi.iji, Srbi u esiopskoi iJV ilizacip (Beograd: SANU. 1993). 923; Aleksa Djil.sc. ccl., 0 istori;.koj karakter Sds. 4. in Sipskopitanje (Belgrade: Politika, 1991 923: and Sainardlii. .[i ruins !stozc. 1
.
173,212, 285.
208
Wa, iIiernor, and Education in a Fragmented Society
209
ography; in the largely Miloevi-controlled press, feuilletons cov ered this topic for months. A commission on genocide was estab lished at the Serbian Academy of Science: Although this topic had already been given a prominent place in the new Serbian textbooks following Miloevis rise to power, educators were even asked to make the genocide a special subject of instruction similar to that of the Flolocaust in Israel or some American schools. The ques 4 tion of the number of victims of the Ustaa politics during the war, especially those who were in the Jasenovac concentration camp, dominated discussion, particularly when Croatias secession from Yugoslavia became more and more likely in 199091. In late 1989, after a final attempt to open a professional discourse on that topic between Croatian and Serbian historians failed and ended in total miscomrnunication, the discussion lost almost all intentions to clar ifv the historical facts and correct inappropriate descriptions and evaluations. Among the intellectuals and politicians on both sides, this topic became little more than a tool for refueling nation alist controversies with the issue of victims of the Ustaa terror dissolving into a pointless body count. While figures were 42 downsized in the Croatian papers, Serbian figures went up, inflating even the figures from the Tito period, which had often been questioned by historians. Why did the Ustaa atrocities come up in this particular situa tion? Neither Croatian war crimes nor Jasenovac had in fact been ignored or neglected. It was not by any means a forgotten (try, and it is hardly convincing, as many Serbs claimed, that the memory of this genocide was suppressed from the collective con sciousness of the Serbs during the 40 years of Titos rule. How 43 ever, within the official concept of a nonethnic war memory under Tito, this subject had indeed been made taboo as a topic of dis cussion in public debatesfroni an ethnic perspective. Jasenovac had been treated as one of many other supraethnic symbols of fas
4 I. SAN U, ed., Sistcm neistina o zlo(inania genocida 1991 1993 godmt (Belgrade: SANU, 1994, 127. 42, Has den, Recounting the Dead, 176-81. 43. SamaidiiP Na ruhi istorije, 258; tbt accusation that this topic had been taboo comes front the Croattan side, hut from the perspective that ii had alavs been used as a weapon to discredit Croats. See als Franjo Tud;rnan, Bcspuca histor;ske zbilnostz, 2nd ed. (Zagreb: Matica Flrvatska, 198. 114.
his cist terror and partisan resistance. With the renewed Serbian nationalist con torical identity which was shaped during the frontation of the 1980s and 1990s,JaseflOVac became the symbol as the of Serbian suffering. It emphasized the self-portrait of Serbs those who bore the lions share victims of the Second World \Vai not of suffering and sacrifice during the war, and were therefore of other peoplcs to be compared with the victims and the heroism against 44 in Yugoslavia. To stress this particular point was to fight 45 the immoral historism of symmetry, as Dobrica osi declared which in the attack on the official memory under the Tito regime. had deliberately avoided in the interest of ethnic appeasement designating any hierarchy of victims along ethnic lines. Jasenovac World in those discussions became not only an example of Second of War terror against Serbs and others but a symbol of the threat genocide against Serbs in generala symbol of genocide as a con Ottoman stant factor in Serbian historical fate, starting with the in the four policy after the defeat of the medieval Serbian state First teenth century and continuing with the Austrian policy in the World War, the German and Croatian policy in the Second World War, and allegedly being repeated by the Croatian policy follow 46 ing Croatias secession from Yugoslavia in 199D91. only through historiographic disputes that this It was not memory contributed to the atmosphere of nationalist mohilita tion. A variety of symbolic forms of re_memoriali7iflg the Second of World War were also used. As part of this symbolic revival f of victims 0 the war genocide, the mass excavations and reburials were cer on both sides, the Serb and the Croat during 199091 Y pub tainly the most spectacular and emotional means of directing as folk lic memory. Many expressions of popular culture, such
there is some support (.r 44. Given the absolute number of vtctlms bs ethnic groups. peopv. absolute terms, Serbs suffered most among the Yuos.av Serbian position. In Slustms had an equal share of vtetims. The gurss in while in relative terms sv;etskon ,.ttu Zareh. l9 Zerjavi, Gubris stano::etva JtgosIavi7e ii dugont 45. osU, Promeme, 299. Knjizctte not inc 716 Sp 46. Vasilije Krestil, 0 genci qenocida nad Srhinsa u NDH, the etghteetsth si I 5 1986), dating back to the Croatian attensp at genocide to tember Zadulbmi centuries; NkoIa Samard2i, Gencid nad Srhima 194 11945, nineteenth Srb:ma s XX U : and Ieter OpaBl, ed.. Gocid nab Milota Cmjanskog. 231 (Belgarde: Grafopublik. 102). t s!acci.Dtncnhc:ng 47. Hayden, Reconnttng tic 1)eatJ, 17279: Denitch,
210
211
songs and neoepic poems, took up Second \Vorld War narratives,
symbols, and parallels in order to exploit them for the national st confrontation, something that the Serbian anthropologist Ivan (olovi has called the ratnifolkior (the war folklore) which was popular during the years of nonviolent and violent conflict. 48 Among extremely nationalist groups, the Second World \Var sym bols were copied, most explicitly among the military gangs of Voji slav eelj who called themselves Chetniks, and the military groups )ed by the Croatian right-wing front man, Dobrislav Paraga. Even the everyday language of politics took on a slang-like quality that was reminiscent of the Second World War. The public disputes between Serbs and Croats were conducted largely in narrative ab hreviations taken from the war (for example, in identifying poutcal opponent as Chetniks and Ustaa, and, with the war spreading into Bosnia, not only referring to the Muslims as Muhadjedin but ilso comparing them with those Muslim forces that served in the German military during the war under the name of the SS Divi sion Handar.) \Vestcrn policy toward Serbia was put in similar 49 historical perspective when, for example, Dobrica Cosi spoke of a continuing World War II against the Serbs to criticize the call for Western intervention during the war in Croatia and Bosnia. The memory of the Second World War achieved considerable importance in Croatias public consciousness as well, first during the years of political activism and finally during the period of mil itarv confrontation. As in Serbia, remembering the war in Croa tia was also closely linked with a redefinition of historical identity after Yugoslavia began to fall apart. And here, too, the memory of the war came under strong political influence. The Croatian pub lic felt especially challenged by the way the war had become a topic of public discussions in Serbia. The polemics about the number of victims in the Serbian press and in public, and the entire way
48. Ivan (olovt, Bordcl ratnika (Belgrade: Slos ograf, 1993). For other esamples, see 41.0 Milena Dragi6evil esi, Neofolk kultura (Novi Sad: lsd.knji3arnica Zorana Stii janosila, 1994), 18391: Milica Bakil I layden, Nesting Orientalism The Case of the Former Yugoslasia, Slavic Review 54:4 (1995): 925. 19. On the question of language during the national t st cool rontatioli and the sr ii ugodas a, see Ranko Bugarski.Jczik of rate do ml,,, (Belgrade: Beogradski krug, 194). esp. 79. 50. Coskh Prornene, 232.
in which the topic was treated during the Cold Warlike con frontation between the two republics beginning in the late 1980s, evoked in many Croats the feeling that they were collectively blamed for Ustaa policy. This feeling had been an underlying sen
timent of the Croatian historical consciousness during the Tito era, and had been put on the agenda in times of national mobilization. as, for example, during the Croatian Spring of 197071. During the Serbo-Croatian conflicts of late 198081 and early 1992, the memory of the war in the Croatian public was grounded largely in the attempt to rebuke and to counterbalance the Serbian mem ory. More important. the question of victims, and particularly those in Jasenovac, became the battlefield between the two competing memories. During the Tito era, this question had been a matter of concern for Croatian intellectuals when political and ideological 51 relaxation allowed them to touch upon this issue. Following a by avoiding sensitive issues, The strategy of ethnic appeasement and the Party leadership had stopped those discussions before a Pandoras box could be opened and historiographic disputes became nationalist confrontations. But it was not only national ist mavericks who were concerned about this problem. Even Croatian historians, far from being historiographic dissidents, had often been reluctant to confirm the official figures of Ustaa and 52 J asenovac victims. Now, with political restrictions withering Croatian historians and the Croatian public threw down the away, gauntlet, categorically rejecting all former figures as having been 53 deliberately inflated in order to discredit Croats. in questioning view, they had a number those figures from an academic point of of good arguments on their side. The most serious recalculations
stanovnitvu SFR) na 51. Bruno Bout Ukupni derografski i neposredni ratni uhict u 2.10 19. dan 15.111. godine zbog Prugog Svetskog rata, llrvatsk: Ktjt3e:t list discuton do: The question of the victim of Ustaia politics also became a matter for Croatian pres ing the so-called Croatian Spring in 1971 and was behind the conflicts ems Srd. ident Tudjman encountel d with the patty as a historian troni the late 1960
See F. Tudman, Bespuca. 1076. ho mentions the 52. For example, the way the question is treated by FiktetaJclit-Butit 2nd 4. official figures but clcarhs wants to avoid confirming them. Ustasc NDH,
Bohas. ed. 53. Lubo Bohan, Zaito je potrebno znati istinu o Jasenovcu Ljuho his dba:e troverze iz povijestilugm!.i09e 3 iZagreb: kolska knisga. 1990. 329: see also Hayden in rot EuroIcan Politics and Soclct:cs 4.3 ) 1990): SSO92: bJ. with Robert 6:2 (1992): 2071 7. and ibid. 7:3 (1993): 18590.
(Zagreb: Liber 1978), 185 17.
212
War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Socict)
213
of wartime losses, published in the mid-1980s by a Croatian demographer and a Serbian historian in exile, came to the conclu sion that Yugoslav wartime losses were considerably lower than the official demographic losses of 1.7 million that had been noted time and again since the late 1940s. Estimating the total wartime 54 losses at approximately I million, the approximation of 700,000 more than I million of Serbs who apparently were murdered to in Jasenovac was unlikely. Even Serhian historians who were not infected by the nationalist sentiment shared by many of their col leagues expressed their doubts about those figures, without, how 55 ever, being able to influence public discourse. For the Croatian public, however, the entire question soon went beyond academic disputes and was treated in a way that raised suspicions that the intention was not so much to correct inappropriate historical facts as to downplay Ustaa atrocities. Later, a not very sophisticated attempt by president Tudj man to normalize the Ustaa terror as 56 just one of many instances of mass atrocities in history showed little insight and could easily he interpreted as a relativization of Croatian atrocities during the Second World War. In the midst of nationalist confrontation between Serbs and Croats at that time, no open discourse on this approach to the wars legacy took place among the Croatian public. Instead of dealing with Ustaa war crimes, the topic of Chetnik and, especially, the partisan terror against Croats during the war dominated the atten tion of the Croatian public. While the partisan atrocities toward the end of the war had undoubtedly been a taboo subject that could oniy be touched upon toward the end of the 1980s, the way this problem was now taken up in Croatia raised suspicions that the Croatian public wished to offset those atrocities against Ustaa war crimes. Against the Jasenovac topic in Serbian memory, the Bleibur topic became one of the main aspects of Croat war memories, symbolizing communist atrocities. The massacre of sev
54. Bob Koovi, rtve Drugog Svetskog Rate ujugoslaviji (London, 1985); Vladimir erjavi, Gubici stanovnistva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskorn ratu (Zagreb, 1989). 55. Aleksa Djilas, Osporavana zemija (Beograd: Knjibevne novmc, 1990), 175; Srd;an Bogoslavljevi, Nerasvetljeni genocia, Srpska strana rata, 159. 56. F. Tudj man, Besputa, 187299.
eral thousand partisan opponents in the city of Bleiburg after they had been handed over to the partisans h British military author Second ities was certainly one of the most well-kept secrets of the the World War and, indeed, almost a forgotten memory. Within concerning the Second context of Serbo-Croatian confrontation of World War, Bleiburg, which is often linked with an inflation was turned into 57 casualties similar to that reported forJasenovac, countermyth against the Serbian Jasenovac myth a kind of Croatian had in order to underscore the fact that numerous Croatians, too. The Croatian historian Mirjana become victims of wartime terror. Gross, the highly respected doyen of Croatian historiography, obviously had this practice of pitting one atrocity against another Croat in mind when he criticized the tendency in parts of the mass killings at the end of the ian public to stress the [partisans] 58 war and to forget those during the war. remembering the Second World War did not become a mat But ter of concern for the Croatian public only in order to counter the Serbian accusations. With Yugoslavia coming to an end and 1991, the memory of the Republic of Croatia to be declared in war also had to play a role as an important element in defining to the entire historical identity of the newl created state. How remember the former Independent State of Croatia was also a nec new essary part of the political and historical self-image that the from this perspec Croatia had to define. And it was especially tive that the publics memory of the Second World War showed neo-Ustaa a high degree of ambivalence. Despite some openly the tendencies, particularly on the extreme right, and despite all high political reprensentatives of confusing rhetoric among even the new Croatian Republic (including the president) in dealing with the past, there was certainly nothing like an official reha bilitation of the Ustaa-led Independent State of Croatia, neither in politics nor, as will be seen later, in education. Nevertheless, ambiguities in dealing with the Ustaa past in public became obvi
erjavit, Opsestje i osegatomamie abe 57. Regarding balancing those hgures, see Valdimir 2 (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), 75. Jasenovca i Bleiburga, als Idea 58. Mirjana Gross, Wie denkt man kroatische Geschichte? Geschichtsschreihung titStsstiftung, Osterreichrscic Osthefte 35:1 (1993): 94.
-
214
Wa, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
215
ous.
The new state did not distance itself from this tradition with out reservation. Crediting the Ustaa state with having realized the dream of a Croatian nation-state, and, second, identifying the territorial dimensions of the Ustaa state largely as Croat lands, the Croatia of the Second World War was at least partly integrated into what could be called the positive traditions of Croatian history. The insensitive use of symbols (despite the fact that often they did not represent Ustaia exclusively but, instead, reflected general Croatian traditions such as the flag or the newly invented currency) and the uncritical remembrance of Ustaa representa tives in public (attempts to name schools and streets after the Croatian writer and part-tune Ustaa minister of education and religion Mile Budak, for example) were examples of the unreflected way in which the past was memorialized in Croatian 59 politics and the public consciousness. Even outside extreme ing publications, the books and articles on Ustaa and the right-w NDH that appeared were often lacking the slightest critical 6 tone. The suggestion, made by Franjo Tudjman himself, that the monument for the victims of fascism at the Jasenovac concen tration camp be replaced by a monument for the victims of total itarian dictatorship, a move that raised bitter criticism among 6 Croatian intellectuals, indicated a certain unwillingness to ground the new states identity in a critical discourse on the na tions past. Obviously, there was not only a limited intention to come to terms with the past, but, to use Theodor Adornos ter minology again, to get rid of the past. 62 Certainly, the memory of the Second World War on both sides, the Serbian and the Croatian, was little more than a resource for 63 political power games. With the cold war between the two republics turning into a military conflict in 1991, the memory of
Skola i vlast, 1: ras,nus, Casopis aa ku1t:ru dcmocracije 15 (1996): 59. Zlatko 4952; and Dubravka Ugreil, J)ie Kultur der LOge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Edition 1995). 60. Vinja Pavelx, ed., Ante PaveizO 100 gothna (Zagreb: Nakiada Starevi7, 1995); 1 Poar, ed., UstaSa: dokumenti o ustaskmn pokretu (Zagreb, 1995). 61. Open letter, by Slavko Goldstein, the former chairman of the Jewish Community in Croatia, in Fei1 tribune (February 1996). 62. Adorno, Was bedeutet Aufarheitung, 555. 63. The Second World War played nly a minor role in the Serho-Slovenian confronta tion. It did, however, have a certain impact on politics in so far as addressing the ques
the war became an instrument for mobilizing people to take up arms. However, manipulation by more or less unscrupulous nationalist poiiticai and intellectual elites tells only part of the story. It hardly explains the tremendous political dynamics that recalling the war set in motion during that conflict. Obviously, there was both a need and a demand for a different memory among large segments of the population. This demand for a new memory probably had different sources. On the one hand, the breakup of Yugoslavia simply made a new historical identity nec essarv. On the other hand, given that a historical memory and a collective self-orientation are essential for individuals of a given environment, the new circumstances of Yugoslavias collapse also demanded a historical consciousness that revolved around the traditions of an individuals own ethnic group. Not surprisingly, for this reason, the Second World War was now remembered exclusively from the perspective of individuals own ethnic groups. More important, this need for a new historical memory obviously derived from a desire to remember those aspects of the individual and the collective memory that had been forgot ten during the past decades. The many different and contradic tory memories that had been excluded from the fragmented mem ory of the Tito era but had often survived as artifacts outside the boundaries of publicly permitted discourse, as 4 Bette Denich put it,6 as private memories, in family traditions, or, at best, as a result of unofficial discourses, now came to the surface. The tremendous political impact that the memory of the Second World War had during the course of Yugoslavias disin tegration and the ensuing war (a fact that often impressed West ern observers as archaic) also demonstrated the power of un official memory, to quote Peter Burke. What happened, besides pure nationalist manipulation orchestrated by various post Titoist elites, was a kind of re-remembering, an anamnesis. as the historian Lucian Hlscher once called this phenomenon in 65 Freudian terms.
demand fn: 80s 9 don of partisan terror in public during the early 1 was par: of the political change that led to the end of communist rule. 64. Denich Dismembering Yugoslavia. 36790. 249(1989): 117. 65. Lucian Hlscher, Geschichte und Vergcsscn, llistrwisrlo Zeitschaft
216
21 7
IV. Remembering the War and Education in the Post-Yugoslav Nation-states
As in socialist Yugoslavia, education in the Yugoslav successor states is also the main channel through which the new post Yugoslav and post socialist memory will be forged into historical identity. The reforms of school programs, textbooks, and teach ing materials that took place in all of the new states after they declared their sovereignty, without a doubt led to a certain liber ation from ideological burdens. But in none of the republics did this lead to an educational system that was free of the excessive influence of state authorities or immediate political repercus sions. It was, in fact, just the opposite. Since 1991, education has in many respects continued to reflect current politics. And, not surprisingly, the new picture of the Second World War being pro moted in the educational system strongly mirrors this political influence. The changes made in the new textbooks and school programs differ substantially among the individual successor states of the former Yugoslavia, both in their intensity and in their content and concept. Compared with the former Titoist memory, the conti nuities are most striking in the new Macedonian textbooks. Only in one respect have post-Yugoslav Macedonian textbooks under gone major changes. While nationalism, fortunately, has not led to the same disastrous consequences in Macedonia as elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, establishing an independent Macedon ian republic nevertheless has led to a somewhat more nationalist political culture. Education in the Republic of Macedonia has responded to this by placing even greater stress on the unity of the Macedonian nation than was the case in the former textbooks. 90s, 9 Since the arly 1 textbooks have been much more explicit about including the Bulgarian Pirin-Macedonia and the Greek Aegean Macedonia in the context of the Second World War than they were during the Tito period. Apart from this, however, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the end of socialism has had a relatively minor effect on the picture of the Second World War as presented in the schools. Textbooks more or less stick to the eval
66 uation and portrait of the war promoted during the Tito period. little need for a com The Macedonian leadership obviously sees plete revision of the historical memory, and this is easy to explain. While the Macedonians undoubtedly benefited from the com munists nationality policy during and after the Second \Vorld War, there was no necessity to rewrite the memory of the war, which more or less gave birth to a fully accepted Macedonian nation within Yugoslavia. Changes have been much more substantial in other republics, with the most drastic consequences occurring, not surprisingly, in Serbia and Croatia. Serbian textbooks have largely followed the nationalist discourse which conquered the public in Serbia in the late 1980s, In doing so, they have shown some remarkable peculiarities reflecting the specific political conditions of the Miloevi regime. On the one hand, current textbooks and his torical education are clearly repeating most of the stereotypes and autostereotypes that the public nationalist discourse has produced. Time and again, Serbian nationalists complained about education that under Titos rule was allegedly forced to pay only minimal attention to the Serbian national consciousness and thus con tributed to the forceful forgetting of a Serhian historical iden 67 tity. Therefore textbooks written under the Miloevi admin istration responded to the critics by endorsing the same images and cognitive values promoted by the nationalist discourse. Also. the basic assumptions of the textbooks and curricula dating from the late 1980s were grounded in a concept of Serbian history that underscored the themes of tragedy, betrayal, the danger of phvs
(Skopje: 1996), 5894. 66. See one of the most recent textbooks, lstorca za VJII.oddekme 1 9 textbooks or with There are no substantial differences compared with earlier, post-19 who have been textbooks for other grades and types of schools. Even Greek critics, few remarks 1991 post- Macedonian textbooks, have made relatively furious about the sub;ect of dealing with on the description of the Second World War apart from the of Mace Greek territories. They have made more complaints about the geography wars. See the highly donian education and such topics as ancient history or the Balkan Remarks polemic criticism by Evangelos Kofos, The Vision of Greater Macedonia: in tone restricted from FYROMs New School Textbooks (Thessaloniki, 1994); more istcriogr.sfia, but no less critical is Sofia Vouri, 1 Balkaniki polemi sti Elawiki scholiki Wars in the Textbook of the For;tc r Republic of faccdosia 299326; and Vouri, (FYROM), 97102. Krestd, ed,, Ix istorqc 67. Vasilije Kresti, C) integracije i dezintegracije srpskog naroda, Srba I srpsko-hrvatskich odnosa (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1994), 313.
218
219
ical annihilation, and the threat of genocide, as well as those of 68 sacrifice and heroism. Within this general paradigm, the Second World War, however, gets a somewhat contradictory consideration. On the one hand, as in the former Titoist textbooks, the partisan struggle has kept its prominent role, occupying the bulk of the chapter on the war and being presented in more or less the same glorifying tone used to 69 describe it during the Tito era. Obviously, the partisan tradition of the Miloevi administration has not lost its function as a cen tral mechanism for constructing a historical identity, even with the end of the former Yugoslavia. On the other hand, this largely tra ditional picture of the war has now been reconstructed from a Ser bocentric perspective. The role of the victims as much as the role of the heroes now falls almost exclusively to the Serbs. While the general description of genocide in the textbooks suggests to stu dents that apart from the Serbs there were few other victims of Nazi and Ustaa terror (with only a brief mention of Jews, Roma, and a small number of Croat antifascists as other victims), the vic tims of Serbian Chetnik terror among the Croats and Muslims, not to mention the victims of partisan terror, are hardly mentioned. From the textbooks, the reader gets the impression that the parti san resistance has been a predominantly Serbian one, disclaiming the Yugoslav character of the National Liberation War which had 7 dominated the former Titoist textbooks. This impression of a pre dominantly Serb resistance to occupation and terror is even more enhanced by the fact that, unlike the former textbooks, the Chet nik movement of Dra.a Mihajlovi, which in the Titoist books had been described exclusively from the perspective of traitors, col laborators, and war criminals, are now given creditat least in the beginning and in their original intentionsfor being a part of the
68. Duhravka Stojanovit, Serhian Textbooks as a Mirror ol the Time, in Hopken, ed.. Oil on fire?, 1 1538; Rosandi Peii, Ratmsivo, 3953. 69. For an example of a textbook, see Istorija za VIII razred 05nov01 skole (Belgrade, 1993). 70. Even when they are dealing with the partisan war outside Serbia, as, for example, in Croatia, students hear only about Serbian partisans. As far as the reduction of the Yugoslav aspect of the war is concerned, already a superficial look at the people men tioned in the textbooks supports this view: While Tito, who was mentioned dozens of time in former textbooks, is mentioned in the chapter on the Second World War only 10 times (and is almost always referred to by his original name,Josip Broz, instead of by his wellknown pseudonym). the name of the Serbian Cheinik leader, Dra5a Miha ,vit, is menu oned 22 times.
antifascist movement. The resistance against foreign occupation and Ustaa thus largely appears to be a Serhian one, promoted either by the mainstream of Serbiandominated communist resis tance or by the national Serbian Chetnik movement. This mixed revision of the memory of the war in Serhian education, which adheres to the traditional partisan tradition on the one hand while Scrbisizing this partisan tradition on the other, is probably an expression of the ruling political conditions in Serbia, where the Miloevi regime has since the mid1980s based its legitimacy not just on nationalism but also on the legacy of socialism, The most radical revision of the Second World War memory can certainly be found in Croatian textbooks. Since Croatia gained its independence, the educational system there has worked hard not only to foster a national identity but also to strengthen the loyal ity of the population to the ruling party and the government of Franjo Tudjman. Croatian critics of educational policy have there fore, from time to time, opposed the tendency toward political inter vention and pressure on education in the schools. Historical 72 education and the rewriting of textbooks are among the areas in which this political influence has been most perceptible. Even the textbooks that were published during the transition from Yu goslavia to Croatia and shortly after the declaration of sovereignty came under political attack for being a Jugonostalgika as well as for adhering too closely to the interpretations and evaluations of the former Yugoslav textbooks. As far as the treatment of the Sec ond World War is concerned, those textbooks, which had been writ ten by academic historians, came under particular attack for their exaggerated criticism of the Ustaa state and its atrocities dur
71. While the textbooks have itot gone so far as to rehabilitate the Chetnik nsovrmetlt, as has been the case in parts of the academic historiography and the public media, the picture they now portray is clearly much more favorable than in the pasi. Tcsthooks arc thus largely following the modest revision of the poriratt of the Chetnikt tha.. example, was drawn by the late Serbian historian Branko Peiranovtc in Rc:ni:sc:,z kontrarcvoluctja u Jugoahizt.n (19411945) iBclgrade: Rad. 19S3). For a much more radical rehabilitation of the Chetniks, one that frees thetis. more or less, fromts the accu sation of collaboration and shows them as representatives of the Serbian nattotsal resis tance, as opposed to the Yugoslav and socio-rcvolutioaary resistance of the Tito partisans, see Veschin Djuretil, Razaranjr Srpstva, 17260, As a criticism of the Croa tian perspective, see Ljuho Roban, Srpska ratna drama Vesclina Djuretil, Kontro verze izpov(iesiiJugoslavmjc I (Zagrcb: Skolska kniiga, 1989), 399442. 72. For example, Zlatko eielj, .Skola t ziast. 49SI, cmiimcizes tIle Tud;nsan sos crnmcu for creating a second totalitarianism in educational policy.
220
221
3 ing the war! Before long, they were largely replaced by textbooks that were more in accordance with the historical ideas of the Tudj man administration. The new textbooks and their description of the the past, however, failed to give the impression that the gov ernment intends to use textbooks and the historical education they portray as a medium for helping students to develop a critical atti tude toward their own past. The history textbook that came out in 1992 for the elementary schools, for example, clearly down played the Ustaa state, its character and its terror. While the Chet nik and partisan atrocities were dealt with at great length under the term of partisan genocide against Croats, Ustaa war crimes were described as the centralist Serbian policy during the interwar Yugoslavia and the Chetnik terror in Croatia. Despite the fact that such extreme examples, which were criticized by Croa tian historians and intellectuals, were removed from later editions and were not repeated in other textbooks, even the most recent textbooks show only limited progress in dealing with the Ustaa past in an appropriate way. It is not that the Independent State of Croatia is glorified; it is described as the authoritarian dictator ship that it was (though it has not been discussed in terms of fas cism). Neither is the Ustaa terror neglected, and, unlike the former textbooks, for the first time it is even described as a genocide against other ethnic groups. However, a tendency to downplay the entire topic of terror is still visible. \Vhile, for example, the description of the institutional order of the Independent State occupies one page and three pages are dedicated to the Chetnik and partisan ter rot the question of Ustaa atrocities is given only a few lines of very general words out of 18 pages dealing with the entire Second 75 World War in Croatia. Again, this topic obviously is not seen as
73. This criticism was largely aimed at the textbook written by the widely respected his torian IVan Jelii. Povijesna Itt inka 4 (Zagreb, 1992) and the textbook Moya doenov esnrk 1 ma (Zagreb, 1991). See Veleotji List (April 1992), Veternp List (June 1992), V (March 1992), Danas (June 1992), and Glasnik (April 1991) for a description of the conflict about these books that ended with their withdrawal. 74. Povijcsi. Za osmi razred osno:ne ikole (Zagreb, 1992), 89, 11213. 75. Besides many full-time and part-tinse jails, concentration camps were also established, and, by reputation, the most well-known of these was the one in Jasenovac. The Ustase (sic) committed terrible atroehies against Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs. The Ustase also conansitted atrocities against Croats who did not agree with the politics of terror, and against communists and antifascists as well. See Ivo Peril, lJrvatska i svijet u XX. stoljeIss, 3rd. ed. (Zagreb, 1995), 136; see also Pregledpovtjesti hrvatskog naroda (od
a major subject for historical education, thus leaving crucial parts of the more recent past more or less in a kind of twilight. While the experience of the war with the Yugoslav Peoples Army and the Croatian Serbs during the early 1990s has certainly favored the political demand for a more national education in Croatia, this can hardly be used as an excuse for the way the war has been treated in the textbooks since 1992. It is doubtful that the didactic approach that applied in dealing with this cnicial aspect of the Croatian past will contribute to an education in democracy and the values of a civil society. If there is anything to be learned from the (highly con tradictory) German experience in dealing with the legacy of the Sec ond World War in education, it is probably the fact that only an open discussion on the memory of the war (which in Germany dates oniy to the late 1960s) will give historical education a chance to contribute to the development of a more stable democratic polit ical culture and a more accurate historical identin Interestingly enough, the more recent Croatian textbooks, unlike their predecessors, are also trying to make the partisan xvar a part of the Croatian historical identity. In order to do so. they, like the Serbiari textbooks, are nationalizing the partisan past, turn ing the Croatian partisans into the good guys, while attribut ing the dirty aspects of the partisan war to the Tito partisans. There is certainly a good deal of evidence that the Croatian Com munist Party and the Croatian partisans under the command of their leadei Andrija Hebrang, were in some important respects 76 following a policy that differed from that of Tito. Separating the Croatian partisan war from the Yugoslav one, as was done by the textbooks, clearly seems to be an attempt to deduce a kind of antifascist legitimacy for the recent Croatian state from the events of the Second World War in order to counterbalance the oppres sive legacy of the Ustaa past. But it is not only the Serbian and Croatian textbooks that are promulgating this kind of a selective memory of the partisan war
Vi. stoljela do nalth dana (Zagreb, 1994). 287. Both hooks are supplementary teach ing materials; they were not designed for specific classes or types of schools. 76. tvo Banac, Wit?, Stalin Against Tito: Comm form Splits in Yugosiav Communism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988), 451 16;Jill Irvine, The Groat Question: Partisan Pol itics in the Formation of the Yugoslav Socialist State (Boulder: Westview, 1993>.
222
XVz; Mernor and Education in a Fragmented Society
223
but the Slovenian ones as well. While in general they have devel oped a more moderate tone and a much more sophisticated di dactical standard, the Slovenian history textbooks and school programs have also clearly adjusted their picture of the war to the new conditions of an independent Slovenian state. Even more than the Croatian textbooks, the Slovenian texts have almost com pletcly eliminated the Yugoslav character of the war by present ing the war from a predominantly Slovenian perspective. \Vhile in one textbook the war is covered in 96 pages, 32 of those pages deal exclusively with events that took place on Slovenian soil, the events of the Yugoslav war are treated as part of the chapter on the \Var in Europe. As in recent Croatian books, the Slovenian partisan war is described as being specifically Slovenian, suggest ing that, particularly in their ideology, the Slovenian partisans had only limited connection with Titos partisans. While the textbooks do concede that both partisan movements had the same goal of reestablishing a socialist Yugoslavia, the underlying assumptions of the books, nevertheless, are that from the beginning there were 77 substantial differences between the two. Again, there is certainly good deal of historical evidence to support this, bearing in mind a the conceptual differences concerning the charactcr of the antifas cist struggle between the Slovenian Communist Party and the Yugoslav Party center, especially during the first two years of the war. Nevertheless, the way those differences were turned into a kind of Slovenian separateness during the war is not only some what artificially exaggerated but was done with the obvious in tention of proving that todays Slovenian independence has its historical foundations in the history of the war. The entire new curriculum in the Slovenian system of education seems to be based on a plan to de-Balkanize Slovenian history by severing the states 78 common rnemory with Yugoslavia as much as possible. This is which the war is presented obviously also the basis for the way in in the schools, an approach that, of course, is based less on didac tical concepts than on political interests.
77. Boo Repe, Naa doba, Oris 7$(odovzne 2O.stotcta. Utbernk ,s 4.razred gmnazije (Ljubljana, 1996), 123239; J. Trunk and S. Nesovi, 2O.stoletc. Zgodovina za ossni rszrcd osnovne loic (LjubIjana. 1993). 78. Predlog ra7grajenega utnega narta zgodovinc za glinnazije, Zgodovinski tasopis 48:2 (1992), S. 2584,9.
V. Conclusion
The Second World War was difficult to remcnther in the former Yugoslavia. The superficial picture of a victorious resistance move ment, having the majority of citizens behind it and leading the people not oniy to freedom from occupation and the reestablish ment of the state but to a social revolution that differed from all other East European countries could give a good deal of legiti macy and support, but it was only one part of the story. This mem ory of a National Liberation War during the Tito period hid the much more complex picture of many competing memories that remained present in Yugoslav society as long as the Party controlled the historical discourse. The official memory as presented in the educational system and in public knowledge during the Tito period did not reflect this plurality of memories, nor did it try to integrate them. It restricted itself to a fragmented and selective memory that, particularly in education, deliberately recalled only those memories that affirmed the political order and the legitimacy of its ruling party. Most important, the ethnic dimension of the war and its civil character were left out. While this communist pol itics of memory did prevent the historical memory of the war from becoming a matter of serious ethnic conflict as long as the Party had control over public discourse, memory did become a matter for political confrontation when the Parts rule finally withered away and when the Common state began to disintegrate during the late l980s. The existing vacuum of memories was then filled not by a more balanced historical consciousness hut by a growing awareness that it could be used as a source of political and military mobilization, The new memory of the war that has replaced the formei official one, reflects the countrys disintegration and the establishment of separate national states. While the content and, most of all, the eval uation of this new memory are now highly divergent and often incompatible among the Yugoslav successor states, they are 11evertheless characterized by a number of common structural features and didactical similarities. The most striking of these is that more or less all republics (with the possible exception of Macedonia) have strongly nationalized the history of the Second World War
East European Politics and Societies 225
224
War; Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
in that they view the events of the war less from a ugoslav per spective than from the dominant perspective of their individual republics. In a sense, this revision is an attempt to get rid of a com mon past in order to legitimate a separate present and future. While this many be understandable from the point of view of current politics, it should hardly be accepted as a didactic and historio graphic approach to examining history, particularly where edu cation is concerned. The end of the common state does not eliminate the necessity to remember the past as a common one, nor can this common past be remembered exclusively in terms of sep arateness. In doing so, the recent textbooks in most of the post Yugoslav republics have created a new fragmented memory along not onl ideological, but ethnic, borderlines. A second common feature of most of the post-Yugoslav text books is that the public memory of the war is still heavily influenced by politics. What Mirjana Gross said some years ago in describing the Croatian Republic can be applied to most of the other republics as well, and it has not lost any of its relevance today: As in the former Yugoslavia, history is still misused as a database for ideological strategies. For the memory of the Second World 79 Wat this means that school programs and textbooks do not see the war as a topic for a self-critical reflection on ones own past but as part of a didactic concept of education whose primary goal is the enhancement of national identity and the legitimation of the current nation-state and its policy. This concept of memory can hardly be expected to turn historical education into the instrument of a democratic political culture. The question of how to deal with the war in all post-Yugoslav states seems to be an open one and should be made a matter for unrestricted and unbiased discourse. From the experience of the Titoist past and the more recent, post-Titoist developments, two principles should be made the basis of this discourse. First, there seems to be a necessity to achieve an undivided memory. It is the totality of tales of sufferings that must be reflected in his torical memory, as the German historian Peter Steinbach has
79. Gross, Wie denkt man kroatische Gcschichte, 95.
demanded of the German experience, and that, 50 in my view, is no less significant for the post-Yugoslav republics. As long as cur rent public discourse and textbooks on the post-Yugoslav republics continue to memorialize the experience of individual ethnic groups and to exclude the experiences of others from their memory, they will more or less repeat the deficits of the former Titoist agenda. Second, the historical memory of the warboth inside and out isde the educational systemhas on all sides been open to what J rgen Habermas calls the ambivalence of ones own history. Coming to terms with the past, as Habermas puts it in applying Adornos phrase, always means the ability and the readiness to accejt an unconditional reflection of a hurting 8 past. This is what memorializing the Second World War in public awareness and in education lacked during the Tito period and is essentially still miss ing in todays post-Yugoslav memories.
80. Steinbach Die Vergegenwrtigung des Vergangenen, 8. 81. Jdrgen Habernsas, Was bedeutet Aufarheitung der Vergangcnheit heute? Die AlaS erne-cin unvollendetes Projekt, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994(, 043.
226
War Memory, and Education in a Eragmentccl Society
227

War Memory and Education in A Fragmented Society The Case of Yugoslavia

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

War Memory and Education in A Fragmented Society The Case of Yugoslavia

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

\ War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia

East European Politics and Societies

century Serbia, see Biljana Trebjetanin, IszholoCk, sadrlaj i miocipatriotizma u savre