\ il)War, Memory, and Educationin a Fragmented Society:The Case of YugoslaviaWolfgang Hoepken

I, War, Memory, and Education in the Balkans

Wars everywhere have always played a major role in historicalmemory. “Even the oldest myths and traditions deal with fighting and killing,” the German novelist Hans-Magnus Enzenbergersaid recently, recalling this simple but no less basic historical fact)While collective memory in premodern societies was largelybased on wartime experiences, the advent of nationalism in thelate eighteenth century increased the importance, the political role,and the cultural significance of war memories in societies everywhere, not only in the Balkans. War memorials, celebrations, cemeteries, and other symbolic, expressions of memory were not only“sites of mourning,” but, more important, they became the meansof fostering a collective national identity;2education, textbooks,and public discourse all combined to remind people of the duty of sacrificing for one’s own nation by recalling former wars.The memory of war thus became a chapter in the “grammar ofnationalism” that was written across Europe during the nineteenthcentury.

In general, the Balkans do not differ from other parts of Europeas far as the relations among war, historical memory, and education are concerned. Most of the symbols, images, and lyrics of warmemories, as well as the strategies used to exploit these memoriesfor political purposes, were more or less the same in the Balkansas elsewhere, and they were often imported from Central Euro

!. Hans Magnus Enzenherger,Ausszchten au/den Burgerkrzeg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp EditiOn, 1996), 9.

2. Jay Winter, Sires of A!ernor,s Sites 0/Mourning: The Great ‘Xr in European Culturalhistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.

0 1999 by the American Council of Learned SocietiesEast Furopcan Politics md Societies, Volume 13, No. I, Winter 959

pean societies. Some specific conditions in Balkan culture and history, however, may have favored a particularly intensive referenceto wars in the collective historical consciousness through publicknowledge, and historical education in this part of Europe. Cultural anthropologists, for example, have argued that a particularunderstanding of time in Balkan societies, one that does not distinguish between former and present historical periods, has shownremarkable persistence up to the present.3 This has kept formerevents (especially wars) alive and has promoted a historical mem

ory that centers around wars.4 So it is that the strong tradition of“patriarchial ethics” typical of Balkan societies, with their preference for militant virtues and heroism, has been held responsible for the prominent place that war has occupied in both theindividual and the collective historical identities of the Balkans.

From the perspective of a historian, another feature of Balkanhistory may explain the war-centered historical memory that ispeculiar to this region: namely, the fact that almost all Balkan nation-states were the immediate product of wars. While Charles Tilly is

certainly correct in writing that all over Europe “war wove the

network of national states,”5 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 Past—lone Perspective and Social History,’ .btuthuethnologica 3 (1991): 85—99; Ivan Colovic. Die Erneuerung des Verg.sngenen. 7eit undRaum in dee zeitgenhssisclsen politischen Mvthologie,” in Nen,sd Stefanov and Michael\Verz, eds., Bosnien und Europa. Do’ Ethnoicrung der Gcscilschaft (Frankfurt: Fischer,1994), 90—103; and Klaus Roth, “Zeit, Gcschichtlicbkeit und \‘ofkskultur irn postsozialistischen Sddostcuropa,” Ze’ttschrzfr ,1ur Balkanologie 31: 1 l995): 31—45.

4. While these anthropological approaches of for inspiring insights into the cultural dimeissions of historical memory and may help to explain, for example, the prominent placeof such historical events as the Battle of Kisovo in 1389 in today’s historical culture andpolitical conflicts in Serbia, in rn’. view they still need more empirical evidence. If I aminterpreting the literature correctly, we still have little knowledge of the inmpaet of socialchange on the understanding of time in the Balkan’.. Remembering old wars within theframework of present political and social contexts and conflicts does not in itself seemto be specifically Balkan. As Peter Burke put it, thete are societies with a long and ashort social memory. Using Poland and lrcland as examples of societies that have a longmemory, the borderline between those t’so types of societies obviously does not separate Central Europe from the traditional patriarchal Balkan. See Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in Thomas Butler, ed .,Mcmorv, Histori, Culture, and the fund(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l989, 97—113.

5. Charles Tilly, C’oercion, Capital ,sod Eur’;’can States (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l992.76.

190 East European Politics and Societies 191

bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans can be takenas a striking example of Norbert Elias’s statement that “nation-states were made out of wars and for wars.”6This immediate linkbetween wars and the birth of the nation-state has, of course, hadtremendous consequences for the collective memory in Balkansocieties. More than anyplace else, perhaps, remembering the warin this part of Europe has always meant remembering the emergence of one’s own nation. From the beginning, therefore, thememory of wars has been a particularly attractive instrument forthe strategy of nation—building in the Balkans—something thattainly has favored the tradition of myth—building and the glori—fication of military violence.

As elsewhere in Europe, education in the Balkans, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, played a crucialrole in fostering a national identity that relied heavily on the memory of warfare and violent upheavals. In particulat the wars andrevolts against the Ottoman Empire stood at the center of a collective memory that the young Balkan national states promoted intextbooks, school programs, and through the formation of a public historical culture.7Wars, whether victorious or lost, were usedby state authorities not just to strengthen national identity but alsoto transmit officially desired social values and virtues. The traditional patriarchal ethos of heroism in Balkan societies thus mergedwith the modern nationalist demand for sacrihec in favor of thenation as one of the main objectives of education.8

The basic principles of education, undisputed during the nine-

6. 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 (1879—1930) i vuspitavaneto nanacionalni uvstva i nacionalno suznanie,” Goddnik em .Sofijskija univerzitet ‘KlimentOLhridsk:j’. Jszoriieskifakultet 75 (1982): 88—123; for Greek textbooks, esp. ChristinaKoulouri, Dimensions zdeologiques de l’historzcité en Grece 1834— 1914. Les snanuels scolaires d’hictoire et de geographic (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991): Christina Koulouri, “Ethnika stercotipa ke Elliniki ethniki tantotita sto scholeio ton l9on eond,” .4fteroma stonpanepistimiako dhasskalo ‘Vass. VI. Efnrocra” (Athens, 1992), 323—341; ConstantinAngelopsulos and Christina Koulouri, “L’identitl nationale grccque: Métamorphoses1830 1996. Etude des manuels scolaires grecs d’histoire, de geographic et de lecture,”Internatunale Schulbuchforschung-Jnternatzonal Textbook Research 18 (1996): 323—350.For Serbi.sn textbooks, see Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalism: Textbooks and the)‘ugo1az’ Union Before 1914 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990).

8. As an example of the promotion of patriotism in popular literature in early-twentieth-century Serbia, see Biljana Trebjetanin, I’szholoCk, sadrlaj i émiocipatriotizma u savre

teenth and early twentieth centuries, were hardly questioned during the interwar period. Even the shock waves of the Great Warof 1914—18, which in this part of the European war theater hadaffected civilians much more than the military, did little to changethe Balkan societies’ attitude toward the memory of war in education. Among the intellectual public in the interwar Balkans therewere traces of a pacifist discourse but they never really influencedthe political culture of their societies and did little to alter the general acceptance of war as a legitimate expression of politics. Thenew experience of “industrialized mass killing” during the FirstWorld War did indeed change the image of war in the public consciousness and in textbooks by adding the aspect of “suffering”to the idealized picture presented in former decades.9 The predominant objectives of education, however, remained intact: Toshow the legitimacy of war to fulfill national interests and to present wars as examples from the past of how to behave and how todefend those national interests. Measures designed to eliminate belligerent nationalist principles of historical education, as counseledby the League of Nations or such nongovernmental organizationsas the Carnegie Foundation, were adopted in the Balkans as reluctandy as elsewhere in Europe. In looking at Bulgarian interwartextbooks, a Carnegie-sponsored analysis of European textbooksin 1925 came to the conclusion that although textbooks in Bulgaria refrained from describing emotions of revenge and did noteven show many of the tragic aspects of warfare, they nonetheless reflected an “csprit helliqueux.”t°The memory of wars in thepublic consciousness and in the educational system after the First\Vorld War, therefore, did not change character and did not losethe instrumental role that it had played in previous decades as atool for national identity management.

uslovisna (Belgrade: Ph.D. l’iloiofski fakultet—Institut sa pshiologiiu, 1°95manuscript, 82—86; and Olga Maniiilos il, “Koncentricni krugose pamenja, scentstradicija i istorija,” Tokovi rstori/e 1-2 (1996: 91—103.

9. For a case study of how the First \Vorld War ss as perceived by the public, see OlgaManojloviC, Tradicije Prvog svetskog rca u Beogradskoj yavnostz 1918—1941 (BelgradeUniversity: 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 countries; ibid., vol. 2 (Paris, 1925).

192 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 193

The Second World War has had a fundamental impact on thememory of war in Central Europe. “After Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the earlier commemorative efforts simply could not beduplicated,” Jay Winter said recently in summarizing the changesthat have been made.11 Education has followed this process overtime in most Central European states by reducing the depictionof war-related events in the history curricula, by purging textbooksof belligerent terminology, and by encouraging efforts toward“peace education.” These changes, however, had fewer repercussions in Balkan societies, where a war-centered historical education stubbornly persisted. The depiction of the nineteenth-centuryanti-Ottoman wars was left more or less untouched in most of theBalkan states, and military conflicts there remained heroic nationalliberation wars. Particularly in socialist countries where the ruling communist parties began to look for a greater national legitimacy (since the late l960s in Bulgaria, for example, and especiallyin Romania), these bourgeoisie-led wars, even under the conditions of socialist education, kept their reputations as the best traditions in national history and as integral parts of the people’shistorical identity.12 But outside the socialist Balkan countries aswell (in Greece, for example), the educational system (at least untilthe lateI970’s) was to a considerable degree devoted to the topicof war as part of the concept of history. This practice was criticized by Greek historians and educational experts time and againas ethnocentric, even though many schools had refrained fromusing the worst stereotypical textbooks that had been common informer 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); 68—71. In the late 1950s andearls’ I 960s, Johp Georgeoff recognized a much more Soviet-centered than nation-centered quality in the Bulgarian texthooks.John Geurgeoff. “Nationalism in the History Textbooks of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria,” Comparative Education Review (October1966); 442—50. For other Balkan countries, Wolfgang Hopken, ed., Oil on Fire—Olins Finer? Textbooks, Ethnic Stereotypes and Violence in South-Eastern Europe—Scl,ulhucher ethnjscl,e Stereotypen und Gewalt in Südosteuropa (Hannover: Hahn,1996).

13. Herkules Millas, “History Textbooks in Greece and lurker.” History Workshop 31(Autumn 1991), 21—33: Nikos Achlis, I ghitoniki snas wulghari ke turki sos scholikawivila istorias ghmnasiou he likeiou (l’hessaloniki, 1983); Ana Frangoudaki, I ta anagh—nostika ssiwl,a tou dhi’noe,kou scholezon (Athens, 1979); Ana Frangoudaki and ThaliaDrsgonas. Greece, in Magne Angvik and Bodo von Boerries. eds.. Youth and History:

While the nineteenth-century wars against the Ottoman Empirecould be remembered in education and public memory in termsof national liberation wars, in all Balkan countries the SecondWorld War posed far more problems for the collective memory.

For countries like Bulgaria and Rornania, which had been in a moreor less close alliance with Germany, memories of the war posed adilemma: Both countries had entered the war for the purpose offulfilling their territorial dreams of becoming nation-states. In thecase of Bulgaria, joining Germany was just another attempt toachieve the so-called San Stefano Bulgaria, including Macedonia,Thrace, and other territories referred to as “Bulgarian soil.” In thecase of Romania, participation in the war on the German side wasmotivated by the hope of reestablishing the “Romania Marc”(Greater Romania) of 1918. While these territorial aims were considered to be “legitimated” even by the communist successor states,the Second World War, at the same time, had to be rememberedas the political adventure of a “native fascist bourgeoisie,” and eachcountry’s defeat in the war had to be praised as the birth of a newpolitical order. Since the 1960s, education and academic liistoriography in both countries have therefore found it hard to bring thetwo competing memories into accord, appearing always to producea somewhat hybrid picture of the official war memory.

Coming to terms with the past, howevem was even moredifficult and painful in those Balkan countries where the SecondWorld War had not only been a fight against foreign aggressorsbut also a civil war, as was the case in Greece and, particularly,Yugoslavia. In these countries, different memories of war met eachother in “conflicts of memories,” to use a phrase by Peter Burke—conflicts of memories that were difficult to appease if they couldbe made a topic of discourse at all, in Greece, for example, for morethan two decades the memory of the civil war remained a matterof political strife, and it was even longer before it became a legitimate topic of educational discourse. Until the early 1980’s, thesubject was excluded from the curriculum in order to avoid perpetuating memories of war among the young generation. As a

A Comparative European Survey on 1-liseorical Consciousness and Politzcal ,-lttttudesAmong Adolescents, vol. A: Descsiptiosi. (Hamburg: Körher-Foundation, 1997). 3D6.

194 XVar, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 195

result, as the Greek textbook analyst Irene Lagani said recently,“Many Greeks are ignorant of one of the most significant chapters in their modern history, one which to a large degree determined the fate of modern Greece.”14

Even more difficult and, judging from recent events, more disastrous in its consequences, was the problem of remembering theSecond World War in Yugoslavia, which will be used as a case studyin the following pages to demonstrate our problems. I shall beginby examining how socialist Yugoslavia dealt with the problem ofremembering the Second World War; I will then deal with the rolethat the public memory of war played in the process of the country’s disintegration, and, finally, I will look at the current problems of war memory and education in the post-Yugoslav states.

U. Remembering the War Under Socialism:Education and Public Knowledge in Tito’s Yugoslavia

For obvious reasons, the memory of the Second World Warplayed a crucial role in public knowledge and education in Tito’sYugoslavia. For example, as far as its function in producing legitimacy for the Party was concerned, this role was probably even moreimportant for the Yugoslav Party than the memory of the GreatPatriotic War in the Soviet Union was for the Communist Party.Remembering the war, therefore, was a matter of a wide-rangingand sophisticated “policy of memory.” It was a major subject ofacademic historiography; museums, research institutes, and journals were actively engaged in the professional production of warmemories. The war was present in public in a dense and largelyuniform net of “lieux de mémoire”; in socialist Yugoslavia almostall symbolic forms of historical memory, such as memorials orofficial holidays, were dedicated to the memory of the war. Political institutions like the Union of Fighters in the People’s Lib

14. Irene Lagani, “The Presentation of Wars in I listory Textbooks in Greece” in Wolfgang Höpken, ed., Oil on Fire—Ol ins freuer? 231; Mark Mazower, “The Cold Warand the Appropriation of Mensory: Greece After Liberation,” East European Politicsand Societies 9:2 (1992): 272—94. For a study of how the memory of the civil war andalso one of the anti-Ottoman wars still influences the social community, see AnnaCollard, “Investigating ‘Social Memory’ in a Greek Context,” in Eli,abeth ‘I’onkin,Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity (New York:1989), 89—103.

eration War (SUBOR) were not just veterans’ organizations hutplayed the role of memory watchdogs. “Offending” the memoryof the National Liberation War could lead to an accusation in courtof “political crime.” And last but not least, schools and universities had to transmit this memory and turn it into loyality for theParty and the political order. Charles S. Maicr’s comment that toomuch memory is not so much an example of a society’s confidencein history as it is evidence of that society’s fear of political change15also aptly describes the situation in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Producing legitimacy for the ruling Communist Party and creating a common identity among the population were the mainobjectives of this memory. As for the Party’s claim of a monopoly of political power and the existence of a common Yugoslavstate, both were deduced from the wartime experience. It washoped that remembering the common fight and suffering duringthe war would help to create consensus in a society that was burdened not only by extreme ethnic, cultural, and religious fragmentation but also by the unfavorable experiences of livingtogether in one state. Memory, therefore, was an important instrument of integration and stability in a fragile regime, which, apartfrom the ideology of Yugoslav socialism and an uneven and unstable economic prosperity, had little to offer to a common identity. Therefore, what had to be remembered and what ought to beforgotten depended most of all on the Party’s strategy of identitymanagement. Recalling the past was seen less as a discourse—inthe sense of Theodor Adorno’s Aufarbeiten der Vergangenheit(coming to terms with the past)1’—and more as remembering amore or less ready-made and unchangeable picture of the war.

This authorized picture was a rather homogeneous one thatshowed little interest in the ambivalence of history. Its narrativewas structured exclusively around the role of the communist partisans, whose political, military, and moral superiority over all otherdomestic and foreign actors had to be demonstrated. In this memory, all strategies and options other than those of the CommunistParty 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 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 197

ply ignored. The role of the noncommunist forces, the partisans’opponents (the Chetniks, for example, or even those who were ofcommunist but non-Titoist persuasions, like the Croatian Partyand the Partisan leader Andrija Hebrang) appeared in this memory only from the perspective of condemnation. Other problems,such as questioning the partisans’ use of violence and the suffering of their victims, were taboo and banned from the official memory. Academic historiography had little room to maneuver indealing with the Second World War. Despite rather late but undisputable progress in professionalization, historians of the war didlittle to break up the limits of the official memory. Escaping fromthe authorized scheme of description and evaluation usually endedup in some form of Party interference. And although historians,already loyal to the Party during the Tito era, expressed concernabout the weaknesses and the omissions of war bistoriographyfrom time to time, the general frame of interpretative patterns, aswell as the taboos, remained more or less stable until the end ofthe Tito era.17 History under the influence of ideology had to praise“brotherhood and unity,” “socialist patriotism,” “self-managementsocialism”; it had to glorify the partisan Yugoslavia. Each attemptto research from a different perspective and critically prove thoseideological approaches was either forbidden or qualified as “chauvinism” or “nationalist deviation,” as historians remarked in public after socialism had come to an cnd)

Education was bound even more strictly by the tenets of thisofficial memory. School programs, textbooks, and teaching at alllevels and in all subjects had to give priority to the transmission

17. Ivo Banac, ‘Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia,” American Historical Review 97:4 (1992): 1083—1104; Wolfgang llöpken, “Von der Mythologisierung zur Stigmatisierung Krieg und Revolution,” in EvaSchmidt-Hartmann, ed.,Jugoslawien 941—1948 im Spiegel von Gcschichtswisenschaft und historischer Publizistik, in Kommunismus und Osteuropa. Konzepte, Perspektzven und Interpretatzonen im Wandel (Munich: Oldenhourg, 1994), 165—201. Critical on the developmentof Yugoslav war historiograph. but in my view still overestimating its progress overtime is Ljubodrad Dinsil, “Od tvrdnje do znanja. Prilog istorili istoriograulje oJugoslaviji u raw 1941—1945,” Vojnoistorijski Glasnik 1—2 (1996): 199—214; and MileB;clajac, “Pregled novije jugoslovenske istoriografi je o pokretu Dragoljuba Mihajlovilai gradjanskom ratu,” in Peter Radan, ed., Draza Mihajlovic (1893-1946): Ftjiy YearsAfter His Death (Sydney: Serbian Studies Foundation, 1996), 79—94.

18. Branko Petranovil, Istorir’ar z sasremena epocha (Beograd: Novinsko-izdavalkaustanova “Vojska,” 1994), 142.

of ideological and so-called patriotic values.19 And, while the so-called self—management socialism was the means of transmittingthe ideological values, the Second World War was the main example used to illustrate the patriotic ones. Textbooks were never reallyfreed from this task in ally of the Yugoslav republics. Few substantial changes took place in the picture of the war as presentedin the schools, at least not between the 1950s and the late 1970s.The (limited) progress in academic historiography bad an evenmore limited impact on textbooks and teaching. For example. theconcurrent, cautious attempts in academic historiography toopen a discussion on “mistakes” in partisan politics did not touchupon sensitive issues and found no reflection in education. In view

of the increasing autonomy the Yugoslav republics gained beginning in the early 1970s, it is even more surprising how little thepicture of the war differed among the textbooks in the individual republics. With almost all educational policies in the hands ofthe republics, their texhooks nevertheless remained little morethan the local version of an undisputed “all-Yugoslav” paradigmof interpretation.23 Federalism therefore had remarkably littleimpact on the picture of tile Second World War that appeared intextbooks and, in this aspect at least, education differed from academics where the federalization of the state that began in the late1960s did influence bistoriography s;gmficantly and, time andagain, led to bitter discussions among historians from various

republics. Tile Second World War obviously had the same inevitable significance for all of tile republican Communist Parties asa source of political iegtimacy forcing them to hold a particularly strong hand on this topic in education.

The way in which the memory of the Second World War waspresented in school duritg the Tito era had a number of short-

19. Diana Plut etal., “Vrednosni sistem osnovnoko1skih dugbeniko,” Psiholoska istrazivanja 4 (1990): 141—204; and Ru2ica Rosandi and Vesna Peti, edt., RatniPvo, p.519

otizam, patrijarhalnost (Beorad: Centar za antiratnu akciu, 1994. 39—54.20. As Carol Lilly has shown, quarrels about textbooks appeared rather early between

the republics and central state institutions, even during tise period of strong centralism in the late 1940s. Carol Lilly, “Problems of Persuasion: Communist Agitation andPropaganda in Post-War Yugoslas is, 1944—1948,” Slavtc Review 53:2 (l994: 395l3.These debates were obviously conflicts over decision-niaking resources but hsd littleimpact on the patterns of dcccripticin and interpretatton which in most part remaineJuniform in their basic assumptions.

198 Wai Mernon’, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 199

comings and consequences that went beyond dubious and biasedinterpretations. Three of these consequences are of particularimportance to me, at least from the perspective of developmentsfollowing Tito’s death. The first one is the description of the warbased on a strictly dualistic, even Manichaean, portrait. While evenacademic historians since the 1 970s have slowly begun to presenta somewhat more sophisticated picture of the partisans’ opponents and the noncommunist actors during the war (without,however, changing their basic evaluations), textbooks haveadhered to a dogmatically simplified dichotomy of “revolutionaries” (i.e., the partisans) and “counterrevolutionaries” (rangingfrom Croatian Ustaa and Serhian Chetniks to native “quislings”and the “bourgeois” government in exile), reserving not just political legitimacy but also the “good” virtues and ethics only for theso-called revolutionaries.

A second shortcoming of the picture presented in the classroomand for public consumption was the tendency to dc-cthnicize thewar on Yugoslav soil. In describing the events of the war predominantly from a class perspective, as a war between communist partisans and all kinds of bourgeois, this approach succeededin ignoring or at least downplaying both the war’s ethnic dimension and its dimension as a civil war. These features of the war couldat best be read between the lines of textbooks; they were nevermade an explicit topic for historical learning and public discourse.Indeed, “each mention of civil var in Yugoslavia during the Second 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 terror against the Serbs had been suppressed in the schools and inpublic knowledge during Tito’s rule. Neither was it the case, asthe Croats claimed, that Croats as a nation were collectively maderesponsible for various war crimes. It was more an attempt toexclude all ethnic aspects from inclusion in the official memoryof the war.

According to the class approach, it was the bourgeoisie on allsides—Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian—that was held responsible for

21. Islirol1ub Vaiit, “Oslohodilaiki di gra]janski rat.” Tokoviistorijc 1—2 (1993): 173.

ethnic violence and war crimes,22 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 wasmentioned primarily as an underlying assumptions in schools orwhere public knowledge was concerned; not surprisingly, it wasexactly this issue that, time and again, sparked serious controversyamong historians of different ethnic backgrounds, particularlySerbs and Croats, and quickly developed into nationalist battlesamong historians and often lead to direct Party intervention to stopthe conflicts.

This way of dealing with the war was, of course, intended tosupport the official ideology of bratstvo i jedinstuo (brotherhoodand unity) and to avoid recognition of the fact that national antagonisms could be fueled by historical memories. The price for thiskind of “guided memory,” however, was that a crucial dimensionof the memory of the Second World War was frozen,23 This hadat least two consequences, which turned out to be dramatic during the process of the country’s dissolution. First of all, it produceda “fragmented memory”—a phrase that has recently been used indiscussions of the historical memory of the war in German society24 but that is also appropriate to describe the situation in Tito’sYugoslavia. Out of the complex character of the war in Yugoslaviaas an antifascist resistance movement and a social class war, butno less as an interethnic and even intraethnic war, only one dimension existed in the ofhcial memory: the war as a “national liberation war and a socialist revolution” as the Second World War was

22. The following textbooks were used during the late ‘70s in Serbia, Croatia, md Sb enia: laconic n.sjnovijeg doba 70 iVnaire’d gunna.r:;c (Beograd, 1973; is’ori;a sani t

jeg doba xc IVrazned gimnaxije (Beograd, 1976); lswnija xc Viii, razsrd ino orikole (Beograd, 1976); Istons,ja xc Viii. naz red osnovne ako1e (Beograd, 1973 Pu” sjest 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 Slovcnusntextbooks that offered the most information on, for example, the Jasenos ac concentration camp. The Croatian and the Serbian texts obviously wanted to as oid making this topic a matter for discussion in the two republics that were the most actis:tvinvolved.

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 1’ergangenem. Zum Spannungss erhaittoisvon individueller Erinnerung und óffentlichem Gedenken,” ,4us Poirtik nod Zc:tgcschichte 3—4 (1997): 3—13.

East European Politics and Societies200 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”25waslargely ignored. It was therefore a highly selective memory, onethat excluded parts of the society from official remembrance andproduced a gap, perhaps even a conflict, between what some ofthe society remembered in private and what was officially remembered in public.

Second, this way of dealing with the history of the Second WorldWar in many respects produced a “vacuum of memory”—whitespots—that could be left untouched only as long as a monopolyon memory existed. The spots were easily filled by others whenthe Communist Party lost its monopoly on discourse and interpretation in the late 1980s. The often cynical topic of the genocideof Serbs during the Second World War could be discussed then onlybecause education and academic historiography had avoided anopen, unrestricted discussion of this aspect of memory in formerdecades. Bringing it into the open ignited the political controversybetween the Serbs and Croats during the country’s decline in the1980s.

Finally, there is a third crucial weakness of the official war memory that needs to be mentioned. The catalog of cognitive valuesthrough which the Second World War was remembered in schoolsand by the public reflected values that some critics have correctlycalled a “knightly” or even a “belligerent,” morality (“vitezkirnoral “or “ratnzck, ?noral”.)26[‘he quantitative share of war eventsand war descriptions found in textbooks and school programsshowed the importance politicians and educational bureaucrats gaveto the memory of wars. The Serbian sociologist Vesna Peié calculated that 58 of 90 texts included in the elementary-school curricu lum during the 1980s dealt with wars (a large share of them withthe Second World ‘War.) About two-thirds of all personalitiesmentioned in these textbooks were described as war heroes, whileonly 25 percent came from science, culture, or politics, as Peié’scolleague Dijana Plut calculated. History textbooks that coveredthe period since 1917 also dedicated up to 50 percent of their con

25. Slubodan Ini. “Jedan iii viie ratova. Tokovi istorije 1—2 (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 ofthis material concentrating explicitly on military events and thedescription of battles. Qualifying the cognitive values behind thesedescriptions in greater detail, a Belgrade-based study group in thelate 1980s came to the conclusion that such values as “the love offreedom” (slobodoijubivost) were interpreted exclusively as “freedom from foreign domination,” not necessarily as freedom of theindividual in the sense of the values of a civil society. “Boldness”(brabrost) and “fighting spirit” (borbenost) ranked among the topfour values transmitted by textbooks. The partisans (and only they)were made the prototype of these virtues and an example of morality for each generation.27The cognitive values transmitted b this

kind of war memory were, in fact, no less than the traditional patriarchal values, which, especially among the Serbian population, hada deep-rooted and long tradition in pre-Yugoslav and pre-socialist times.28 While the textbooks did not ignore the cruelty of thewar and its tragic consequences for the individual, death appearedlargely to be a necessary sacrifice that must be made for one’s community. In looking at the memory of the Great War in Europeancountries, George Mosse has argued that even the description ofsuffering and the tragedy of war can result in a trivialization in whichthe acceptance of war is seen as something that is inevitable,29Thesame argument can be made for the Yugoslav textbooks and theirway of dealing with the Second World War. Communist educationthus used traditional values as its cognitive basis, albeit within anew, socialist context.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what effect this kindof education and public discourse on the war had on people andtheir mentality. Reliable methods of measuring the influence of education on historical consciousness are rare, and empirical evidenceis 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 “partisanmorality the basis of our socialist morality,” see Istora napsoz:iicg doba za JVrazrcdgimnazije (Beograd, 1976), 117.

28. B.Trebjesanin, Patriotzam. 86f; Zagorka Golubovié, “Nekeliko teza o teorijskins pretpostavkama za slom Jugoslavije,” RaspadJugoslav:je (Belgrade: Institut ca filozofijui drutvenu teoriju, 1994). 36—38.

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 East European Politics and Societies 203

lected, any correlation between education, historical consciousness,and political behavior is highly speculative. Simple explanationsshould therefore be avoided, especially with respect to Yugoslavia.The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody war were not causedby historical memory or by education. However, the way inwhich the Second World War was remembered through educationand in public knowledge may well have influenced the politicalevents that led to the violent clashes of the early 1990s.

First, there was the omissions of historical education in dealing with the war in the classroom as well as in the general public under Tito that paved the way for historical memory to beused for nationalist mobilization. The fragmented and selectivememory, with all its hidden and ignored stories, left niches for“subversive” memories, which, under the circumstances of political disintegration and economic and social crisis, were vulnerable tQ manipulation. Charles jelavich’s conclusion, drawn fromexamining nineteenth-century south-Slav textbooks, that education did not prepare students to live in a common state afterthe irst World War,3°can easily be applied to the Tito period.Ihe historical memory of the Second World War was never a mat1cr (1 unrestricted discussion. Furthermore, there was never adisc iursc on how a multietli nic society whose population consstc I of extremely divergent individual and collective memories

oulcl manage this complex legacy sufficiently to come to termswith its complex past. Failings in both the political and the historical culture proved to be a fundamental obstacle in makingsocial memory a matter of integrating the society. The nonexistence of a pluralist academic and public discourse in the Yugoslavsociety, which characterized Titoism despite its apparently liberal elements, prevented the formation of a historical consciousness that would block the political misuse and manipulationof history. In the end, the deficits of a rational and critical historical memory were the price the Party had to pay for its useof the memory of the Second World War exclusively as aninstrument 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.

204 Wai; Memory, and Education in a fragmented Society

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 Titci’s 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 People’s Liberation War,” a public

discourse that emancipated itself more and more front former

restrictions began to develop. ‘1 hroughout the long process of the

country’s 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 Party’s claim to historical legitimacy. The Party’s

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 Party’s supposed platform of an “anti

Stalinist legacy” on which Tito and the Yugoslav communists had

built their legitimacy during the previous forty years.31 Once this

31. Robert Hayden, “Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery of \X’.srtime Msssacres ii:

Late— and Post—Communist Yu0islavia, “in Ruhie Watson, ed .,Me’nn’v, Jhston

East European Politics and Societies 205

step had been taken, it was only a matter of time before theuntouchable role of Tito himself was challenged.32Soon the Second World War would become a matter for discussion, targetingyet another issue that was crucial to the Party’s legitimacy. Withpolitical controversies among the Yugoslav republics becomingmore radical toward the end of the 1980s and with the search forpolitical alternatives questioning more and more not just thecountry’s socialist order but the Yugoslav state itself, the historical discourse soon took the direction of a much more fundamental revision of the historical memory. With politics spurring thedisintegration of Yugoslavia in favor of separate nation-states, thehistorical memory became increasingly nationalized. Together withthe Yugoslav state, its institutions, ideology, and political order,the historical memory fragmented and disintegrated.

From the outset, remembering the Second World War in thisprocess 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 inpublic discourse, in the former Yugoslavia the memory of the warbecame one of the major subjects of public discussion. Both theintensity and the tone of the discussion quickly reached such a levelof polemics and bitterness that some foreign observers describedit as a strange “obsession with history.”33The media played a leading role in this forum, and historians and intellectuals took partin it, creating a historical discourse in which the borderlinebetween academic historiography and a nonprofessional historicaijournalism rapidly began to disappear. This public debate soonwent beyond scientific disputes. becoming part of the politics ofethnic confrontation itself. Before long, the memory of the Second World War had turned into “political capital” exploited bythe political elites. Both the post-Titoist, but communist, leaders(such as Slobodan Miloevié) as much as the pluralist, but nationalist, leaders (such as later Croatian president Franjo Tud iman) used

Opposition Under State Socialism, (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1993),16R—70.

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.

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

port the policy of the country’s dissolution. The memory 0f the

last war thus contributed to preparing people for the new war that

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 Tito’s 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 country’s

federal order and the basic principles of Tito’s 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

sive view of this feeling of Serbian deprivation in Yugoslavia:4

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 Miloeviã 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(.

•.i•9

207206 Wa Alemory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East Ewropean Politics and Societies

including the threat of genocide—and had therefore always beenforced to fight for their survival and their freedom.

It was a picture that the former American ambassador WilliamZimmerman, frustrated by the political events during his term ofoffice, described as the “lugubrious, paranoid and Serbocentricview oi the past. . . to blame everybody but themselves for whatever goes wrong.”36 This picture was most explicitly expressedby Dobrica osiã, the Serbian writer and a temporary Yugoslavpresident in whose essays and writings Serbs were almost exclusively reduced to a fate of “constant suffering” and “betrayal,”while also to one of militant striving for “freedom. This wasa historical autostereotype, one that revolved around an almostsacral collective suffering but, nonetheless, included an extraordinary heroism. The historian Radovan Samardi a widely recognized specialist in medieval and early modern Serbian historywho was himself involved in the historiographic nationalism ofthe late I980s and early I 990s, expressed this historical self-imagein the tradition of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. AsSamardi put it, the lesson the Serbs learned from history wasthat “without death there is no resurrection, and without suffering and pain there is no freedom, neither individual nor collective.”38 Wars and military virtues played a crucial role in thishistorical autostereotype, becoming not only the backbone of thenation’s history but an integral part of the Serbian national character. These virtues were therefore not only a subject of mythsand epic poetry but they were declared to he a “principle of eth35. 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., Stateand ‘oition Building in East Central [urope: Contemporary Perspectives (New York:Columhia Unisersitv, 1996), 17—37; Wolfgang Hdpken, “Geschichtc und Gewalt.Gesclsiclstsbewuf(tsein ins ugoslass nelsen Konfiikt,” Internat innate Schulbuch—frschung_lntcrsiatio,ial Textbook Rscarcl, 15:1 (1993): 55—73; Nebojia Popov, Sip-ski popnhisam. ‘Od snargmalne do iIn’iznantne pojs cc (Beograd, I 903), 16. A typicalexample of historical self-image is \ cselin Djurctit, Razaranje Srova u XX.veku(Beograd, SANU, 1992).

36. Zimmerman, “The Last Ambassador,” 3.37. Numcrous exansples of this can be found in Dobrica ijosii, S’pskopiiasjedc,nokratsko

pitan;c (Belgrade: Politika, 1992), 26, 32, 36, 39,43, 148; Dobrica Cosi, Prosnene (NoviSad: 1)ncvnik, 1991), 221. 241.

38. Radovan Samard%id, “0 istorijsko sudbini Srbo,” Zadulnna Miloia Crnjanskog: Serbia i komentari za 1990/91 (Belgrade, 1991), 165—84. For similar quotations fromSamard;i)’s numerous interviews an] statements during tie late ‘SOs and early ‘90s,see ibid., “Na ruhu istorije” (Belgrade: Srpska Knjilevisa Zadruga, 1994), 191.

nic being,” as the Serhian sociologist Nehoja Popov has noted

in a critique of Serbian identity.39In the end, then, the post—Yugoslav Serbian identity was based

largely on the same militant cognitive values that characterized the

Tito era. But while the virtues of the Titoist regime were noneth

nic values, symbolized by the partisans’ tradition in the Sec5nJ

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 Samardió 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 country’s values and morals should he drawn even in

the present.4°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), 89—93.

40. Radovan Samard9it, “Aristokratska vertikala u srpskoj istoi.iji,” Srbi u es’iopskoi iJV

ilizacip (Beograd: SANU. 1993). 9—23; Aleksa Djil.sc. ccl., “0 istori;’.koj karakter Sd’s.”

in Sipskopitanje (Belgrade: Politika, 1991 . 9—23: and Sainardlii. .“[i ruins !sto’z’c. 1 4.

173,212, 285.

208 Wa, iIiernor’, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 209

ography; in the largely Miloeviã-controlled press, feuilletons covered this topic for months. A commission on genocide was established at the Serbian Academy of Science: Although this topic hadalready been given a prominent place in the new Serbian textbooksfollowing Miloevié’s rise to power, educators were even asked tomake the genocide a special subject of instruction similar to thatof the Flolocaust in Israel or some American schools.4’The question 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 Croatia’s secession fromYugoslavia became more and more likely in 1990—91. In late 1989,after a final attempt to open a professional discourse on that topicbetween Croatian and Serbian historians failed and ended in totalmiscomrnunication, the discussion lost almost all intentions to clar—ifv the historical facts and correct inappropriate descriptions andevaluations. Among the intellectuals and politicians on bothsides, this topic became little more than a tool for refueling nationalist controversies with the issue of victims of the Ustaa terrordissolving into a pointless body count.42 While figures weredownsized in the Croatian papers, Serbian figures went up,inflating even the figures from the Tito period, which had oftenbeen questioned by historians.

Why did the Ustaa atrocities come up in this particular situation? Neither Croatian war crimes nor Jasenovac had in fact beenignored or neglected. It was not by any means a forgotten(try, and it is hardly convincing, as many Serbs claimed, that “thememory of this genocide was suppressed from the collective consciousness of the Serbs” during the 40 years of Tito’s rule.43 However, within the official concept of a nonethnic war memory underTito, this subject had indeed been made taboo as a topic of discussion in public debatesfroni an ethnicperspective. Jasenovac hadbeen 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 aweapon to discredit Croats. See als Franjo Tud;rnan, Bcspuca histor;ske zbilnostz, 2nded. (Zagreb: Matica Flrvatska, 198°. 114.

cist terror and partisan resistance. With the renewed Serbian his

torical identity which was shaped during the nationalist con

frontation of the 1980s and 1990s,JaseflOVac became the symbol

of Serbian suffering. It emphasized the self-portrait of Serbs as the

victims of the Second World \Vai those who bore the lion’s share

of suffering and sacrifice during the war, and were therefore not

to be compared with the victims and the heroism of other peoplcs

in Yugoslavia.44To stress this particular point was to fight against

the “immoral historism of symmetry,”45as Dobrica osié declared

in the attack on the official memory under the Tito regime. which

in the interest of “ethnic appeasement” had deliberately avoided

designating any hierarchy of victims along ethnic lines. Jasenovac

in those discussions became not only an example of Second World

War terror against Serbs and others but a symbol of the threat of

genocide against Serbs in general—a symbol of “genocide as a con

stant factor in Serbian historical fate,” starting with the Ottoman

policy after the defeat of the medieval Serbian state in the four

teenth century and continuing with the Austrian policy in the First

World War, the German and Croatian policy in the Second World

War, and allegedly being repeated by the Croatian policy follow

ing Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia in 199D—91.46

It was not only through historiographic disputes that this

memory contributed to the atmosphere of nationalist mohilita

tion. A variety of symbolic forms of re_memoriali7iflg the Second

World War were also used. As part of this “symbolic revival of

genocide,” the mass excavations and reburials of victims 0f the war

on both sides, the Serb and the Croat during 1990—91 Y were cer

tainly the most spectacular and emotional means of directing pub

lic memory. Many expressions of popular culture, such as folk

44. Given the absolute number of vtctlms bs ethnic groups. there is some support (.r

Serbian position. In absolute terms, Serbs suffered most among the Yuos’.av peopv’.

while in relative terms Slus’tms had an equal share of vtetims. The gurss in

Zerjavi, Gubris stano:’:etva JtgosIavi7e ii d’ugont sv;etsko’n ,.ttu ‘Zareh. l°9

45. osU, Promeme, 299.46. Vasilije Krestil, “0 genci qenocida nad Srhinsa u NDH,” Knjizctte not inc 716 Sp

tember 1986), dating back to the Croatian attensp’5at genocide to the etghteetsth si I

nineteenth centuries; NkoIa Samard2ié, “Gencid nad Srhima 194 1—1945,” Zadulbmi

Milota Cmjanskog. 231: and I’eter OpaBl, ed.. Gocid nab Srb:ma s XX U

(Belgarde: Grafopublik. 102).47. Hayden, Reconnttng tic 1)eatJ’, 172—79: Denitch, Dtncnhc’:ng s!acci.-t

211210 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies

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”) whichwas popular during the years of nonviolent and violent conflict.48Among extremely nationalist groups, the Second World \Var sym

bols were copied, most explicitly among the military gangs of Vojislav eelj who called themselves Chetniks, and the military groups)ed by the Croatian right-wing front man, Dobrislav Paraga. Eventhe everyday language of politics took on a slang-like quality thatwas reminiscent of the Second World War. The public disputesbetween Serbs and Croats were conducted largely in narrative abhreviations taken from the war (for example, in identifying pout-cal opponent as Chetniks and Ustaa, and, with the war spreadinginto Bosnia, not only referring to the Muslims as Muhadjedin butilso comparing them with those Muslim forces that served in theGerman military during the war under the name of the SS Division Handar.)49\Vestcrn policy toward Serbia was put in similarhistorical perspective when, for example, Dobrica Cosi spoke ofa “continuing World War II” against the Serbs to criticize the callfor Western intervention during the war in Croatia and Bosnia.

The memory of the Second World War achieved considerableimportance in Croatia’s public consciousness as well, first duringthe years of political activism and finally during the period of militarv confrontation. As in Serbia, remembering the war in Croatia was also closely linked with a redefinition of historical identityafter Yugoslavia began to fall apart. And here, too, the memoryof the war came under strong political influence. The Croatian public felt especially challenged by the way the war had become a topicof public discussions in Serbia. The polemics about the numberof victims in the Serbian press and in public, and the entire way

48. Ivan (olovté, Bordcl ratnika (Belgrade: Slos ograf, 1993). For other esamples, see 41.0Milena Dragi6evil esié, Neofolk kultura (Novi Sad: lsd.knji3arnica Zorana Stiijanosila, 1994), 183—91: Milica Bakil I layden, ‘Nesting Orientalism The Case of theFormer 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, 1°94).esp. 79.

50. Coskh Prornene, 232.

in which the topic was treated during the Cold War—like 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 1970—71. During

the Serbo-Croatian conflicts of late 1980—81 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

relaxation allowed them to touch upon this issue.51 Following a

strategy of “ethnic appeasement” by avoiding sensitive issues, The

and the Party leadership had stopped those discussions before a

Pandora’s 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

Jasenovac victims.52 Now, with political restrictions withering

away, Croatian historians and the Croatian public threw down the

gauntlet, categorically rejecting all former figures as having been

deliberately inflated in order to discredit Croats.53 in questioning

those figures from an academic point of view, they had a number

of good arguments on their side. The most serious recalculations

51. Bruno Bout “Ukupni derografski i neposredni ratni uhict u stanovnitvu SFR) na

dan 15.111. godine zbog Prugog Svetskog rata,” llrvatsk: K’tjt3e’:t list 2.10 19.

The question of the victim’ of Ustaia politics also became a matter for discu’ton do:

ing the so-called Croatian Spring in 1971 and was behind the conflicts Croatian pres

ident Tudjman encountel d with the patty as a historian troni the late 1960 ems Srd.

See F. Tudman, Bespuc’a. 10—76.

52. For example, the way the question is treated by FiktetaJclit-Butit ho mentions the

official figures but clcarhs wants to avoid confirming them. Ustasc NDH, 2nd 4.

(Zagreb: Liber 1978), 185 17.

53. Lubo Bohan, “Zaito je potrebno znati istinu o Jasenovcu Ljuho Bohas’. ed.

troverze iz povijestilugm!.i09e 3 iZagreb: kolska knisga. 1990’. 329: see also his dba:e

with Robert Hayden in rot EuroIcan Politics and Soclct:cs 4.3 ) 1990): SSO—92: bJ.

6:2 (1992): 207—1 7. and ibid. 7:3 (1993): 185—90.

212 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Socict)’ East European Politics and Societies 213

of wartime losses, published in the mid-1980s by a Croatiandemographer and a Serbian historian in exile, came to the conclusion that Yugoslav wartime losses were considerably lower thanthe official demographic losses of 1.7 million that had been notedtime and again since the late 1940s. Estimating the total wartimelosses at approximately I million,54 the approximation of 700,000to more than I million of Serbs who apparently were murderedin Jasenovac was unlikely. Even Serhian historians who were notinfected by the nationalist sentiment shared by many of their colleagues expressed their doubts about those figures, without, however, being able to influence public discourse.55 For the Croatianpublic, however, the entire question soon went beyond academicdisputes and was treated in a way that raised suspicions that theintention was not so much to correct inappropriate historical factsas to downplay Ustaa atrocities. Later, a not very sophisticatedattempt by president Tudj man to “normalize” the Ustaa terror asjust one of many instances of mass atrocities in history56 showedlittle insight and could easily he interpreted as a relativization ofCroatian atrocities during the Second World War.

In the midst of nationalist confrontation between Serbs andCroats at that time, no open discourse on this approach to the war’slegacy took place among the Croatian public. Instead of dealingwith Ustaa war crimes, the topic of Chetnik and, especially, thepartisan terror against Croats during the war dominated the attention of the Croatian public. While the partisan atrocities towardthe end of the war had undoubtedly been a taboo subject that couldoniy be touched upon toward the end of the 1980s, the way thisproblem was now taken up in Croatia raised suspicions that theCroatian public wished to offset those atrocities against Ustaa warcrimes. Against the Jasenovac topic in Serbian memory, the“Bleibur” topic became one of the main aspects of Croat warmemories, symbolizing communist atrocities. The massacre of sev

54. Bob Koovi, rtve Drugog Svetskog Rate ujugoslaviji (London, 1985); Vladimirerjavi, Gubici stanovnis’tva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskorn ratu (Zagreb, 1989).

55. Aleksa Djilas, Osporavana zemija (Beograd: Knjibevne novmc, 1990), 175; Srd;anBogoslavljevié, “Nerasvetljeni genocia,” Srpska strana rata, 159.

56. F. Tudj man, Besputa, 187—299.

eral thousand partisan opponents in the city of Bleiburg after they

had been handed over to the partisans h British military author

ities was certainly one of the most well-kept secrets of the Second

World War and, indeed, almost a forgotten memory. Within the

context of Serbo-Croatian confrontation concerning the Second

World War, Bleiburg, which is often linked with an inflation of

casualties similar to that reported forJasenovac,57was turned into

a kind of Croatian countermyth against the Serbian Jasenovac myth

in order to underscore the fact that numerous Croatians, too. had

become victims of wartime terror. The Croatian historian Mirjana

Gross, the highly respected doyen of Croatian historiography,

obviously had this practice of pitting one atrocity against another

in mind when he criticized the “tendency in parts of the Croat

ian public to stress the [partisans’] mass killings at the end of the

war and to ‘forget’ those during the war.”58

But remembering the Second World War did not become a mat

ter of concern for the Croatian public only in order to counter

Serbian accusations. With Yugoslavia coming to an end and the

Republic of Croatia to be declared in 1991, the memory of the

war also had to play a role as an important element in defining

the entire historical identity of the newl created state. How to

remember the former Independent State of Croatia was also a nec

essary part of the political and historical self-image that the new

Croatia had to define. And it was especially from this perspec

tive that the public’s memory of the Second World War showed

a high degree of ambivalence. Despite some openly neo-Ustaa

tendencies, particularly on the extreme right, and despite all the

confusing rhetoric among even high political reprensentatives of

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

57. Regarding balancing those hgures, see Valdimir2erjavit, Opsestje i osegatomamie abe

Jasenovca i Bleiburga, (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), 75.

58. Mirjana Gross, “Wie denkt man kroatische Geschichte? Geschichtsschreihung als Idea -

titStsstiftung,” Osterreichrsci’c Osthefte 35:1 (1993): 94.

214 Wa, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 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

politics and the public consciousness.59 Even outside extreme

right-wing publications, the books and articles on Ustaa and the

NDH that appeared were often lacking the slightest criticaltone.6°The suggestion, made by Franjo Tudjman himself, that themonument for the victims of fascism at the Jasenovac concen

tration camp be replaced by a monument for the victims of totalitarian dictatorship, a move that raised bitter criticism amongCroatian intellectuals,6’indicated a certain unwillingness to

ground the new state’s identity in a critical discourse on the nation’s past. Obviously, there was not only a limited intention “tocome to terms with the past,” but, to use Theodor Adorno’s terminology 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

political power games.63 With the cold war between the two

republics turning into a military conflict in 1991, the memory of

59. Zlatko “Skola i vlast,” 1: ras,nus, Casopis aa ku1t:ru dcmocracije 15 (1996):

49—52; 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 Yugoslavia’s collapse also

demanded a historical consciousness that revolved around the

traditions of an individual’s 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

Bette Denich put it,64 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 Yugoslavia’s 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 Hölscher once called this phenomenon in

Freudian terms.65

don of partisan terror in public during the early 1980s was par: of the demand fn:

political change that led to the end of communist rule.

64. Denich “Dismembering Yugoslavia.” 367—90.

65. Lucian Hölscher, “Geschichte und Vergcsscn,” llistrwisrlo’ Zeitschaft 249(1989): 1—17.

216 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 21 7

IV. Remembering the War and Educationin the Post-Yugoslav Nation-states

As in socialist Yugoslavia, education in the Yugoslav successorstates is also the main channel through which the new postYugoslav and post socialist memory will be forged into historicalidentity. The reforms of school programs, textbooks, and teaching materials that took place in all of the new states after theydeclared their sovereignty, without a doubt led to a certain liberation from ideological burdens. But in none of the republics didthis lead to an educational system that was free of the excessiveinfluence of state authorities or immediate political repercussions. It was, in fact, just the opposite. Since 1991, education hasin many respects continued to reflect current politics. And, notsurprisingly, the new picture of the Second World War being promoted in the educational system strongly mirrors this politicalinfluence.

The changes made in the new textbooks and school programsdiffer substantially among the individual successor states of theformer Yugoslavia, both in their intensity and in their content andconcept. Compared with the former Titoist memory, the continuities are most striking in the new Macedonian textbooks. Onlyin one respect have post-Yugoslav Macedonian textbooks undergone major changes. While nationalism, fortunately, has not ledto the same disastrous consequences in Macedonia as elsewherein the former Yugoslavia, establishing an independent Macedonian republic nevertheless has led to a somewhat more nationalistpolitical culture. Education in the Republic of Macedonia hasresponded to this by placing even greater stress on the “unity ofthe Macedonian nation” than was the case in the former textbooks.Since the arly 1990s, textbooks have been much more explicitabout including the Bulgarian Pirin-Macedonia and the GreekAegean Macedonia in the context of the Second World War thanthey were during the Tito period. Apart from this, however, thebreakup of Yugoslavia and the end of socialism has had arelatively minor effect on the picture of the Second World War aspresented in the schools. Textbooks more or less stick to the eval

uation and portrait of the war promoted during the Tito period.66

The Macedonian leadership obviously sees little need for a com

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 Tito’s 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

tity.67 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

66. See one of the most recent textbooks, lstorca za VJII.oddekme (Skopje: 1996), 58—94.

There are no substantial differences compared with earlier, post-1991textbooks or with

textbooks for other grades and types of schools. Even Greek critics, who have been

furious about the post-1991 Macedonian textbooks, have made relatively few remarks

on the description of the Second World War apart from the sub;ect of dealing with

Greek territories. They have made more complaints about the geography of Mace

donian education and such topics as ancient history or the Balkan wars. See the highly

polemic criticism by Evangelos Kofos, The Vision of Greater Macedonia: Remarks

from FYROM’s New School Textbooks (Thessaloniki, 1994); more restricted in tone

but no less critical is Sofia Vouri, ‘1 Balkaniki polemi sti Elawiki scholiki istcriogr.sfia,”

299—326; and Vouri, “Wars in the Textbook of the For;’tc r Republic of faccdo’sia

(FYROM),” 97—102.67. Vasilije Krestiã, “C) integracije i dezintegracije srpskog naroda,” Krestd, ed,, Ix istorqc

Srba I srpsko-hrvatskich odnosa (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1994), 313.

218 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 219

ical annihilation, and the threat of genocide, as well as those ofsacrifice and heroism.68

Within this general paradigm, the Second World War, however,gets a somewhat contradictory consideration. On the one hand, asin the former Titoist textbooks, the partisan struggle has kept itsprominent role, occupying the bulk of the chapter on the war andbeing presented in more or less the same glorifying tone used todescribe it during the Tito era.69 Obviously, the partisan traditionof the Miloevi administration has not lost its function as a central mechanism for constructing a historical identity, even with theend of the former Yugoslavia. On the other hand, this largely traditional picture of the war has now been reconstructed from a Serbocentric perspective. The role of the victims as much as the roleof the heroes now falls almost exclusively to the Serbs. While thegeneral description of genocide in the textbooks suggests to students that apart from the Serbs there were few other victims of Naziand Ustaa terror (with only a brief mention of Jews, Roma, and“a small number of Croat antifascists” as other victims), the victims of Serbian Chetnik terror among the Croats and Muslims, notto mention the victims of partisan terror, are hardly mentioned.From the textbooks, the reader gets the impression that the partisan resistance has been a predominantly Serbian one, disclaimingthe Yugoslav character of the National Liberation War which haddominated the former Titoist textbooks.7°This impression of a predominantly Serb resistance to occupation and terror is even moreenhanced by the fact that, unlike the former textbooks, the Chetnik movement of Dra.a Mihajlovió, which in the Titoist books hadbeen described exclusively from the perspective of traitors, collaborators, and war criminals, are now given credit—at least in thebeginning and in their original intentions—for being a part of the

68. Duhravka Stojanovit, “Serhian Textbooks as a Mirror ol the Time,” in Hopken, ed..Oil on fire?, 1 15—38; Rosandié Peii, Ratmsivo, 39—53.

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 theYugoslav aspect of the war is concerned, already a superficial look at the people mentioned in the textbooks supports this view: While Tito, who was mentioned dozensof time in former textbooks, is mentioned in the chapter on the Second World Waronly 10 times (and is almost always referred to by his original name,Josip Broz, insteadof by his well—known pseudonym). the name of the Serbian Cheinik leader, Dra5a Miha—

,vit, is menu oned 22 times.

antifascist movement. The resistance against foreign occupationand Ustaa thus largely appears to be a Serhian one, promotedeither by the mainstream of Serbian—dominated communist resistance or by the national Serbian Chetnik movement. This mixedrevision of the memory of the war in Serhian education, whichadheres to the traditional partisan tradition on the one hand while“Scrbisizing” this partisan tradition on the other, is probably anexpression of the ruling political conditions in Serbia, where theMiloevié regime has since the mid—1980s based its legitimacy notjust on nationalism but also on the legacy of socialism,

The most radical revision of the Second World War memory cancertainly be found in Croatian textbooks. Since Croatia gained itsindependence, the educational system there has worked hard notonly to foster a national identity but also to strengthen the loyal—ity of the population to the ruling party and the government ofFranjo Tudjman. Croatian critics of educational policy have therefore, from time to time, opposed the tendency toward political intervention and pressure on education in the schools.72 Historicaleducation and the rewriting of textbooks are among the areas inwhich this political influence has been most perceptible. Even thetextbooks that were published during the transition from Yugoslavia to Croatia and shortly after the declaration of sovereigntycame under political attack for being a “Jugonostalgika” as well asfor adhering too closely to the interpretations and evaluations ofthe former Yugoslav textbooks. As far as the treatment of the Second World War is concerned, those textbooks, which had been written by academic historians, came under particular attack for their“exaggerated” criticism of the Ustaa state and its atrocities dur71. 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, thepicture they now portray is clearly much more favorable than in the pasi. Tcsthooksarc 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:,zkontrarcvoluctja u Jugoahizt.n (1941—1945) iBclgrade: Rad. 19S3). For a much moreradical rehabilitation of the Chetniks, one that frees thetis. more or less, fromts the accusation of collaboration and shows them as representatives of the Serbian nattotsal resistance, as opposed to the Yugoslav and socio-rcvolutioaary resistance of the Titopartisans, see Veschin Djuretil, Razaranjr Srpstva, 17—260, As a criticism of the Croatian perspective, see Ljuho Roban, “Srpska ratna drama Vesclina Djuretil,” Kontroverze izpov(iesiiJugoslavmjc I (Zagrcb: Skolska kniiga, 1989), 399—442.

72. For example, Zlatko eielj, .Skola t z’iast. 49—SI, cmiimcizes tIle Tud;nsan sos crnmcufor creating a second totalitarianism in educational policy.

East European Politics and Societies 221220 War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

ing the war!3Before 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 inter-

war 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

World War in Croatia.75 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

ma (Zagreb, 1991). See Veleotji List (April 1992), Veternp List (June 1992), V1esnrk

(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, 112—13.

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, l—Jrvatska 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 partsof the more recent past more or less in a kind of twilight. Whilethe experience of the war with the Yugoslav People’s Army andthe Croatian Serbs during the early 1990s has certainly favored thepolitical demand for a more national education in Croatia, this canhardly be used as an excuse for the way the war has been treatedin the textbooks since 1992. It is doubtful that the didactic approachthat applied in dealing with this cnicial aspect of the Croatian pastwill contribute to an education in democracy and the values of acivil society. If there is anything to be learned from the (highly con

tradictory) German experience in dealing with the legacy of the Second World War in education, it is probably the fact that only anopen discussion on the memory of the war (which in Germany datesoniy to the late 1960s) will give historical education a chance tocontribute to the development of a more stable democratic political culture and a more accurate historical identin

Interestingly enough, the more recent Croatian textbooks,unlike their predecessors, are also trying to make the partisan xvara part of the Croatian historical identity. In order to do so. they,like the Serbiari textbooks, are nationalizing the partisan past, turning the Croatian partisans into the “good” guys, while attributing the “dirty” aspects of the partisan war to the Tito partisans.There is certainly a good deal of evidence that the Croatian Communist Party and the Croatian partisans under the command oftheir leadei Andrija Hebrang, were in some important respectsfollowing a policy that differed from that of Tito.76 Separating theCroatian partisan war from the Yugoslav one, as was done by thetextbooks, clearly seems to be an attempt to deduce a kind ofantifascist legitimacy for the recent Croatian state from the eventsof the Second World War in order to counterbalance the oppressive legacy of the Ustaa past.

But it is not only the Serbian and Croatian textbooks that arepromulgating this kind of a selective memory of the partisan war

Vi. stoljela do nalth dana (Zagreb, 1994). 287. Both hooks are supplementary teaching 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), 45—1 16;Jill Irvine, The Groat Question: Partisan Politics in the Formation of the Yugoslav Socialist State (Boulder: Westview, 1993>.

222 XVz; Mernor and Education in a Fragmented Society East European Politics and Societies 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, theevents 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 Tito’s 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

substantial differences between the two.77 Again, there is certainly

a good deal of historical evidence to support this, bearing in mind

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 thewar. 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 today’s 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 state’s

common rnemory with Yugoslavia as much as possible.78 This is

obviously also the basis for the way in which the war is presented

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. Ut’bernk ,s 4.razred gmnazije

(Ljubljana, 1996), 123—239; J. T’runk 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. 258—4,9.

224 War; Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

V. Conclusion

The Second World War was difficult to remcnther in the formerYugoslavia. The superficial picture of a victorious resistance movement, having the majority of citizens behind it and leading thepeople not oniy to freedom from occupation and the reestablish

ment of the state but to a social revolution that differed from allother East European countries could give a good deal of legiti

macy and support, but it was only one part of the story. This memory of a National Liberation War during the Tito period hid themuch more complex picture of many competing memories thatremained present in Yugoslav society as long as the Party controlledthe historical discourse. The official memory as presented in theeducational system and in public knowledge during the Titoperiod did not reflect this plurality of memories, nor did it try tointegrate them. It restricted itself to a fragmented and selectivememory that, particularly in education, deliberately recalled onlythose memories that affirmed the political order and the legitimacyof its ruling party. Most important, the ethnic dimension of thewar and its civil character were left out. While this communist “pol

itics of memory” did prevent the historical memory of the warfrom becoming a matter of serious ethnic conflict as long as theParty had control over public discourse, memory did become amatter for political confrontation when the Part’s rule finallywithered away and when the Common state began to disintegrateduring the late l980s. The existing vacuum of memories was then

filled not by a more balanced historical consciousness hut by agrowing awareness that it could be used as a source of politicaland military mobilization,

The new memory of the war that has replaced the formei officialone, reflects the country’s disintegration and the establishment ofseparate national states. While the content and, most of all, the evaluation of this new memory are now highly divergent and oftenincompatible among the Yugoslav successor states, they are 11ev-

ertheless characterized by a number of common structural featuresand didactical similarities. The most striking of these is that moreor 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

in that they view the events of the war less from a ugoslav perspective than from the dominant perspective of their individualrepublics. In a sense, this revision is an attempt to get rid of a common past in order to legitimate a separate present and future. Whilethis many be understandable from the point of view of currentpolitics, it should hardly be accepted as a didactic and historiographic approach to examining history, particularly where education is concerned. The end of the common state does noteliminate the necessity to remember the past as a common one, norcan this common past be remembered exclusively in terms of separateness. In doing so, the recent textbooks in most of the postYugoslav republics have created a new fragmented memory alongnot onl’ ideological, but ethnic, borderlines.

A second common feature of most of the post-Yugoslav textbooks is that the public memory of the war is still heavilyinfluenced by politics. What Mirjana Gross said some years agoin describing the Croatian Republic can be applied to most of theother republics as well, and it has not lost any of its relevance today:“As in the former Yugoslavia, history is still misused as a databasefor ideological strategies.”79For the memory of the Second WorldWat this means that school programs and textbooks do not seethe war as a topic for a self-critical reflection on one’s own pastbut as part of a didactic concept of education whose primary goalis the enhancement of national identity and the legitimation of thecurrent nation-state and its policy. This concept of memory canhardly be expected to turn historical education into the instrumentof a democratic political culture.

The question of how to deal with the war in all post-Yugoslavstates seems to be an open one and should be made a matter forunrestricted and unbiased discourse. From the experience of theTitoist past and the more recent, post-Titoist developments, twoprinciples should be made the basis of this discourse. First, thereseems to be a necessity to achieve an “undivided” memory. It is“the totality of tales of sufferings” that must be reflected in historical memory, as the German historian Peter Steinbach has

79. Gross, “Wie denkt man kroatische Gcschichte,” 95.

demanded of the German experience,50and that, in my view, is noless significant for the post-Yugoslav republics. As long as current public discourse and textbooks on the post-Yugoslav republicscontinue to memorialize the experience of individual ethnic groupsand to exclude the experiences of others from their memory, theywill more or less repeat the deficits of the former Titoist agenda.Second, the historical memory of the war—both inside and outisde the educational system—has on all sides been open to whatJürgen Habermas calls the ambivalence of one’s own history.“Coming to terms with the past,” as Habermas puts it in applyingAdorno’s phrase, always means the ability and the readiness toaccejt an “unconditional reflection of a hurting past.”8’This is whatmemorializing the Second World War in public awareness and ineducation lacked during the Tito period and is essentially still missing in today’s post-Yugoslav memories.

80. Steinbach Die Vergegenwártigung des Vergangenen,” 8.81. Jdrgen Habernsas, “Was bedeutet Aufarheitung der Vergangcnheit heute?” Die AlaSerne-cin unvollendetes Projekt, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994(, 043.

226 War Memory, and Education in a Eragmentccl Society East European Politics and Societies 227