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

\
War, Memory, and Education

in a Fragmented Society:
The Case of Yugoslavia
Wolfgang Hoepken
I, War, Memory, and Education in the Balkans
Wars everywhere have always played a major role in historical

memory. Even the oldest myths and traditions deal with fight
ing and killing, the German novelist Hans-Magnus Enzenberger
said recently, recalling this simple but no less basic historical fact)
While collective memory in premodern societies was largely
based on wartime experiences, the advent of nationalism in the
late eighteenth century increased the importance, the political role,
and the cultural significance of war memories in societies every
where, not only in the Balkans. War memorials, celebrations, ceme
teries, and other symbolic, expressions of memory were not only
sites of mourning, but, more important, they became the means
of fostering a collective national identity;
2 education, textbooks,
and public discourse all combined to remind people of the du
ty of sacrificing for ones own nation by recalling former wars.
The memory of war thus became a chapter in the grammar of
nationalism that was written across Europe during the nineteenth
century.
In general, the Balkans do not differ from other parts of Europe
as far as the relations among war, historical memory, and educa
tion are concerned. Most of the symbols, images, and lyrics of war
memories, as well as the strategies used to exploit these memories
for political purposes, were more or less the same in the Balkans
as elsewhere, and they were often imported from Central Euro
!. Hans Magnus Enzenherger,Ausszchten au/den Burgerkrzeg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Edi
tiOn, 1996), 9.
2. Jay Winter, Sires of A!ernor,s Sites 0/Mourning: The Great Xr in European Cultural
history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.
190
East
0 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies

Furopcan Politics md Societies, Volume 13, No. I, Winter 959
il)
pean societies. Some specific conditions in Balkan culture and his
tory, however, may have favored a particularly intensive reference
to wars in the collective historical consciousness through public
knowledge, and historical education in this part of Europe. Cul
tural anthropologists, for example, have argued that a particular
understanding of time in Balkan societies, one that does not dis
tinguish between former and present historical periods, has shown
3 This has kept former
remarkable persistence up to the present.
events (especially wars) alive and has promoted a historical mem
4 So it is that the strong tradition of
ory that centers around wars.
typical
of Balkan societies, with their pref
patriarchial ethics
erence for militant virtues and heroism, has been held responsi
ble for the prominent place that war has occupied in both the
individual and the collective historical identities of the Balkans.
From the perspective of a historian, another feature of Balkan
history may explain the war-centered historical memory that is
peculiar to this region: namely, the fact that almost all Balkan nationstates were the immediate product of wars. While Charles Tilly is
certainly correct in writing that all over Europe war wove the
5 this circumstance nevertheless has
network of national states,
particular relevance for modern Balkan history. From the emer
gence of national states following Ottoman rule during the nine
teenth century to the youngest nation-states arising from the
3. Joel M. Halpern, Interpreting the Pastlone Perspective and Social History, .btuthu
ethnologica 3 (1991): 8599; Ivan Colovic. Die Erneuerung des Verg.sngenen. 7eit und
Raum in dee zeitgenhssisclsen politischen Mvthologie, in Nen,sd Stefanov and Michael
\Verz, eds., Bosnien und Europa. Do Ethnoicrung der Gcscilschaft (Frankfurt: Fischer,
1994), 90103; and Klaus Roth, Zeit, Gcschichtlicbkeit und \ofkskultur irn post
ur Balkanologie 31: 1 l995): 3145.
1
sozialistischen Sddostcuropa, Zettschrzfr ,
4. While these anthropological approaches of for inspiring insights into the cultural dimeis
sions of historical memory and may help to explain, for example, the prominent place
of such historical events as the Battle of Kisovo in 1389 in todays historical culture and
political conflicts in Serbia, in rn. view they still need more empirical evidence. If I am
interpreting the literature correctly, we still have little knowledge of the inmpaet of social
change on the understanding of time in the Balkan.. Remembering old wars within the
framework of present political and social contexts and conflicts does not in itself seem
to be specifically Balkan. As Peter Burke put it, thete are societies with a long and a
short social memory. Using Poland and lrcland as examples of societies that have a long
memory, the borderline between those tso types of societies obviously does not sep
arate Central Europe from the traditional patriarchal Balkan. See Peter Burke, His
tory as Social Memory, in Thomas Butler, ed .,Mcmorv, Histori, Culture, and the fund
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l989, 97113.
5. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital ,sod Eur;can States (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l992.
76.
East European Politics and Societies
191
bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans can be taken

as a striking example of Norbert Eliass statement that nationstates were made out of wars and for wars.
6 This immediate link
between wars and the birth of the nation-state has, of course, had
tremendous consequences for the collective memory in Balkan
societies. More than anyplace else, perhaps, remembering the war
in this part of Europe has always meant remembering the emer
gence of ones own nation. From the beginning, therefore, the
memory of wars has been a particularly attractive instrument for
the strategy of nationbuilding in the Balkanssomething that
tainly has favored the tradition of mythbuilding and the glori
fication of military violence.
As elsewhere in Europe, education in the Balkans, especially dur
ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, played a crucial
role in fostering a national identity that relied heavily on the mem
ory of warfare and violent upheavals. In particulat the wars and
revolts against the Ottoman Empire stood at the center of a col
lective memory that the young Balkan national states promoted in
textbooks, school programs, and through the formation of a pub
lic historical culture.
7 Wars, whether victorious or lost, were used
by state authorities not just to strengthen national identity but also
to transmit officially desired social values and virtues. The tradi
tional patriarchal ethos of heroism in Balkan societies thus merged
with the modern nationalist demand for sacrihec in favor of the
nation as one of the main objectives of education.
8
The basic principles of education, undisputed during the nine6. Norbert Flias. Die Gesellschaft der Individuen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Editinn, 1987). 276.
7. On the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century textbooks and education in Bulgaria
see Mariji Radeva, Uebnicite po bulgarska istoria (18791930) i vuspitavaneto na
nacionalni uvstva i nacionalno suznanie, Goddnik em .Sofijskija univerzitet Kliment
OLhridsk:j. Jszoriieskifakultet 75 (1982): 88123; for Greek textbooks, esp. Christina
Koulouri, Dimensions zdeologiques de lhistorzcit en Grece 1834 1914. Les snanuels sco
laires dhictoire et de geographic (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991): Christina Koulouri, Eth
nika stercotipa ke Elliniki ethniki tantotita sto scholeio ton l9on eond, .4fteroma ston
panepistimiako dhasskalo Vass. VI. Efnrocra (Athens, 1992), 323341; Constantin
Angelopsulos and Christina Koulouri, Lidentitl nationale grccque: Mtamorphoses
1830 1996. Etude des manuels scolaires grecs dhistoire, de geographic et de lecture,
Internatunale Schulbuchforschung-Jnternatzonal Textbook Research 18 (1996): 323350.
For Serbi.sn textbooks, see Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalism: Textbooks and the
az Union Before 1914 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990).

1
)ugo
8. As an example of the promotion of patriotism in popular literature in early-twentieth-
century Serbia, see Biljana Trebjetanin, IszholoCk, sadrlaj i miocipatriotizma u savre
192
War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
teenth and early twentieth centuries, were hardly questioned dur

ing the interwar period. Even the shock waves of the Great War
of 191418, which in this part of the European war theater had
affected civilians much more than the military, did little to change
the Balkan societies attitude toward the memory of war in edu
cation. Among the intellectual public in the interwar Balkans there
were traces of a pacifist discourse but they never really influenced
the political culture of their societies and did little to alter the gen
eral acceptance of war as a legitimate expression of politics. The
new experience of industrialized mass killing during the First
World War did indeed change the image of war in the public con
sciousness and in textbooks by adding the aspect of suffering
9 The pre
to the idealized picture presented in former decades.
dominant objectives of education, however, remained intact: To
show the legitimacy of war to fulfill national interests and to pre
sent wars as examples from the past of how to behave and how to
defend those national interests. Measures designed to eliminate bel
ligerent nationalist principles of historical education, as counseled
by the League of Nations or such nongovernmental organizations
as the Carnegie Foundation, were adopted in the Balkans as reluc
tandy as elsewhere in Europe. In looking at Bulgarian interwar
textbooks, a Carnegie-sponsored analysis of European textbooks
in 1925 came to the conclusion that although textbooks in Bul
garia refrained from describing emotions of revenge and did not
even show many of the tragic aspects of warfare, they nonethe
The memory of wars in the
t
less reflected an csprit helliqueux.
public consciousness and in the educational system after the First
\Vorld War, therefore, did not change character and did not lose
the instrumental role that it had played in previous decades as a
tool for national identity management.
uslovisna (Belgrade: Ph.D. liloiofski fakultetInstitut sa pshiologiiu, 195
manuscript, 8286; and Olga Maniiilos il, Koncentricni krugose pamenja, scents
tradicija i istorija, Tokovi rstori/e 1-2 (1996: 91103.
9. For a case study of how the First \Vorld War ss as perceived by the public, see Olga
ManojloviC, Tradicije Prvog svetskog rca u Beogradskoj yavnostz 19181941 (Belgrade
University: MA. thesis. 1996). Manuscript.
10. Dotation Carnegie pour Ia Paix Intci nationales, Direction des relations at lCducation,
Enquete surles livres scolaires dopers gus ire, vol. 1 (Paris, 1923): for other Balkan coun
tries; ibid., vol. 2 (Paris, 1925).
193
The Second World War has had a fundamental impact on the

memory of war in Central Europe. After Hiroshima and Ausch
witz, the earlier commemorative efforts simply could not be
duplicated, Jay Winter said recently in summarizing the changes
that have been made.
11 Education has followed this process over
time in most Central European states by reducing the depiction
of war-related events in the history curricula, by purging textbooks
of belligerent terminology, and by encouraging efforts toward
peace education. These changes, however, had fewer repercus
sions in Balkan societies, where a war-centered historical educa
tion stubbornly persisted. The depiction of the nineteenth-century
anti-Ottoman wars was left more or less untouched in most of the
Balkan states, and military conflicts there remained heroic national
liberation wars. Particularly in socialist countries where the rul
ing communist parties began to look for a greater national legiti
macy (since the late l960s in Bulgaria, for example, and especially
in Romania), these bourgeoisie-led wars, even under the condi
tions of socialist education, kept their reputations as the best tra
ditions in national history and as integral parts of the peoples
historical identity.
12 But outside the socialist Balkan countries as
well (in Greece, for example), the educational system (at least until
the late I
70s) was to a considerable degree devoted to the topic
9
of war as part of the concept of history. This practice was criti
cized by Greek historians and educational experts time and again
as ethnocentric, even though many schools had refrained from
using the worst stereotypical textbooks that had been common in
former decades.
3
11. Winter. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 9.
12. For Bulgaria, see Mil2o Lalkov, Vuprosite na balkanskata istorija v kursa go obita
i bulgarska istorija na srednite uilita, Vekove 4(1973); 6871. In the late 1950s and
earls I 960s, Johp Georgeoff recognized a much more Soviet-centered than nationcentered quality in the Bulgarian texthooks.John Geurgeoff. Nationalism in the His
tory Textbooks of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, Comparative Education Review (October
1966); 44250. For other Balkan countries, Wolfgang Hopken, ed., Oil on FireOl
ins Finer? Textbooks, Ethnic Stereotypes and Violence in South-Eastern Europe

Scl,ulhucher ethnjscl,e Stereotypen und Gewalt in Sdosteuropa (Hannover: Hahn,
1996).
13. Herkules Millas, History Textbooks in Greece and lurker. History Workshop 31
(Autumn 1991), 2133: Nikos Achlis, I ghitoniki snas wulghari ke turki sos scholika
wivila istorias ghmnasiou he likeiou (lhessaloniki, 1983); Ana Frangoudaki, I ta anagh
nostika ssiwl,a tou dhinoe,kou scholezon (Athens, 1979); Ana Frangoudaki and Thalia
Drsgonas. Greece, in Magne Angvik and Bodo von Boerries. eds.. Youth and History:
194
XVar, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
While the nineteenth-century wars against the Ottoman Empire

could be remembered in education and public memory in terms
of national liberation wars, in all Balkan countries the Second
World War posed far more problems for the collective memory.
For countries like Bulgaria and Rornania, which had been in a more
or less close alliance with Germany, memories of the war posed a
dilemma: Both countries had entered the war for the purpose of
fulfilling their territorial dreams of becoming nation-states. In the
case of Bulgaria, joining Germany was just another attempt to
achieve the so-called San Stefano Bulgaria, including Macedonia,
Thrace, and other territories referred to as Bulgarian soil. In the
case of Romania, participation in the war on the German side was
motivated by the hope of reestablishing the Romania Marc
(Greater Romania) of 1918. While these territorial aims were con
sidered to be legitimated even by the communist successor states,
the Second World War, at the same time, had to be remembered
as the political adventure of a native fascist bourgeoisie, and each
countrys defeat in the war had to be praised as the birth of a new
political order. Since the 1960s, education and academic liistoriog
raphy in both countries have therefore found it hard to bring the
two competing memories into accord, appearing always to produce
a somewhat hybrid picture of the official war memory.
Coming to terms with the past, howevem was even more
difficult and painful in those Balkan countries where the Second
World War had not only been a fight against foreign aggressors
but also a civil war, as was the case in Greece and, particularly,
Yugoslavia. In these countries, different memories of war met each
other in conflicts of memories, to use a phrase by Peter Burke
conflicts of memories that were difficult to appease if they could
be made a topic of discourse at all, in Greece, for example, for more
than two decades the memory of the civil war remained a matter
of political strife, and it was even longer before it became a legit
imate topic of educational discourse. Until the early 1980s, the
subject was excluded from the curriculum in order to avoid per
petuating memories of war among the young generation. As a
A Comparative European Survey on 1-liseorical Consciousness and Politzcal ,-lttttudes
Among Adolescents, vol. A: Descsiptiosi. (Hamburg: Krher-Foundation, 1997). 3D6.
195
result, as the Greek textbook analyst Irene Lagani said recently,

Many Greeks are ignorant of one of the most significant chap
ters in their modern history, one which to a large degree deter
mined the fate of modern Greece.
14
Even more difficult and, judging from recent events, more dis
astrous in its consequences, was the problem of remembering the
Second World War in Yugoslavia, which will be used as a case study
in the following pages to demonstrate our problems. I shall begin
by examining how socialist Yugoslavia dealt with the problem of
remembering the Second World War; I will then deal with the role
that the public memory of war played in the process of the coun
trys disintegration, and, finally, I will look at the current prob
lems of war memory and education in the post-Yugoslav states.
U. Remembering the War Under Socialism:
Education and Public Knowledge in Titos Yugoslavia
For obvious reasons, the memory of the Second World War

played a crucial role in public knowledge and education in Titos
Yugoslavia. For example, as far as its function in producing legit
imacy for the Party was concerned, this role was probably even more
important for the Yugoslav Party than the memory of the Great
Patriotic War in the Soviet Union was for the Communist Party.
Remembering the war, therefore, was a matter of a wide-ranging
and sophisticated policy of memory. It was a major subject of
academic historiography; museums, research institutes, and jour
nals were actively engaged in the professional production of war
memories. The war was present in public in a dense and largely
uniform net of lieux de mmoire; in socialist Yugoslavia almost
all symbolic forms of historical memory, such as memorials or
official holidays, were dedicated to the memory of the war. Po
litical institutions like the Union of Fighters in the Peoples Lib
14. Irene Lagani, The Presentation of Wars in I listory Textbooks in Greece in Wolf
gang Hpken, ed., Oil on FireOl ins freuer? 231; Mark Mazower, The Cold War
and the Appropriation of Mensory: Greece After Liberation, East European Politics
and Societies 9:2 (1992): 27294. For a study of how the memory of the civil war and
also one of the anti-Ottoman wars still influences the social community, see Anna
Collard, Investigating Social Memory in a Greek Context, in Eli,abeth Ionkin,
Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity (New York:
1989), 89103.
196
eration War (SUBOR) were not just veterans organizations hut

played the role of memory watchdogs. Offending the memory
of the National Liberation War could lead to an accusation in court
of political crime. And last but not least, schools and universi
ties had to transmit this memory and turn it into loyality for the
Party and the political order. Charles S. Maicrs comment that too
much memory is not so much an example of a societys confidence
15
in history as it is evidence of that societys fear of political change
also aptly describes the situation in Titos Yugoslavia.
Producing legitimacy for the ruling Communist Party and cre
ating a common identity among the population were the main
objectives of this memory. As for the Partys claim of a monop
oly of political power and the existence of a common Yugoslav
state, both were deduced from the wartime experience. It was
hoped that remembering the common fight and suffering during
the war would help to create consensus in a society that was bur
dened not only by extreme ethnic, cultural, and religious frag
mentation but also by the unfavorable experiences of living
together in one state. Memory, therefore, was an important instru
ment of integration and stability in a fragile regime, which, apart
from the ideology of Yugoslav socialism and an uneven and un
stable economic prosperity, had little to offer to a common iden
tity. Therefore, what had to be remembered and what ought to be
forgotten depended most of all on the Partys strategy of identity
management. Recalling the past was seen less as a discoursein
the sense of Theodor Adornos Aufarbeiten der Vergangenheit
and more as remembering a
1
(coming to terms with the past)
more or less ready-made and unchangeable picture of the war.
This authorized picture was a rather homogeneous one that
showed little interest in the ambivalence of history. Its narrative
was structured exclusively around the role of the communist par
tisans, whose political, military, and moral superiority over all other
domestic and foreign actors had to be demonstrated. In this mem
ory, all strategies and options other than those of the Communist
Party were presented either as historically illegitimate or were sim
15. Charles S. Maier, A Surfeit of Memory, History and Mernon 5 (1993): 50,
16. Theodor W Adorno, Was bedeuted Aufarheitung der Vergangenheit?, Kulturkrs
tile und Gesellsclaaft, uol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Fdition, 1977): 555.
197
ply ignored. The role of the noncommunist forces, the partisans

opponents (the Chetniks, for example, or even those who were of
communist but non-Titoist persuasions, like the Croatian Party
and the Partisan leader Andrija Hebrang) appeared in this mem
ory only from the perspective of condemnation. Other problems,
such as questioning the partisans use of violence and the suffer
ing of their victims, were taboo and banned from the official mem
ory. Academic historiography had little room to maneuver in
dealing with the Second World War. Despite rather late but undis
putable progress in professionalization, historians of the war did
little to break up the limits of the official memory. Escaping from
the authorized scheme of description and evaluation usually ended
up in some form of Party interference. And although historians,
already loyal to the Party during the Tito era, expressed concern
about the weaknesses and the omissions of war bistoriography
from time to time, the general frame of interpretative patterns, as
well as the taboos, remained more or less stable until the end of
the Tito era.
17 History under the influence of ideology had to praise
brotherhood and unity, socialist patriotism, self-management
socialism; it had to glorify the partisan Yugoslavia. Each attempt
to research from a different perspective and critically prove those
ideological approaches was either forbidden or qualified as chau
vinism or nationalist deviation, as historians remarked in pub
lic after socialism had come to an cnd)
Education was bound even more strictly by the tenets of this
official memory. School programs, textbooks, and teaching at all
levels and in all subjects had to give priority to the transmission
17. Ivo Banac, Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia, Amer
ican Historical Review 97:4 (1992): 10831104; Wolfgang llpken, Von der Mythol
ogisierung zur Stigmatisierung Krieg und Revolution, in EvaSchmidt-Hartmann, ed.,
Jugoslawien 9411948 im Spiegel von Gcschichtswisenschaft und historischer Pub

lizistik, in Kommunismus und Osteuropa. Konzepte, Perspektzven und Interpretatzo
nen im Wandel (Munich: Oldenhourg, 1994), 165201. Critical on the development
of Yugoslav war historiograph. but in my view still overestimating its progress over
time is Ljubodrad Dinsil, Od tvrdnje do znanja. Prilog istorili istoriograulje o

Jugoslaviji u raw 19411945, Vojnoistorijski Glasnik 12 (1996): 199214; and Mile
B;clajac, Pregled novije jugoslovenske istoriografi je o pokretu Dragoljuba Mihajlovila
i gradjanskom ratu, in Peter Radan, ed., Draza Mihajlovic (1893-1946): Ftjiy Years
After His Death (Sydney: Serbian Studies Foundation, 1996), 7994.
18. Branko Petranovil, Istorirar z sasremena epocha (Beograd: Novinsko-izdavalka
ustanova Vojska, 1994), 142.
198
Wai Mernon, and Education in a Fragmented Society
19 And, while the soof ideological and so-called patriotic values.

called selfmanagement socialism was the means of transmitting
the ideological values, the Second World War was the main exam
ple used to illustrate the patriotic ones. Textbooks were never really
freed from this task in ally of the Yugoslav republics. Few sub
stantial changes took place in the picture of the war as presented
in the schools, at least not between the 1950s and the late 1970s.
The (limited) progress in academic historiography bad an even
more limited impact on textbooks and teaching. For example. the
concurrent, cautious attempts in academic historiography to
open a discussion on mistakes in partisan politics did not touch
upon sensitive issues and found no reflection in education. In view
of the increasing autonomy the Yugoslav republics gained begin
ning in the early 1970s, it is even more surprising how little the
picture of the war differed among the textbooks in the individ

ual republics. With almost all educational policies in the hands of
the republics, their texhooks nevertheless remained little more
than the local version of an undisputed all-Yugoslav paradigm
interpretation. Federalism therefore had remarkably little
of 23
impact on the picture of tile Second World War that appeared in
textbooks and, in this aspect at least, education differed from aca
demics where the federalization of the state that began in the late
1960s did influence bistoriography s;gmficantly and, time and
again, led to bitter discussions among historians from various
republics. Tile Second World War obviously had the same inevi
table significance for all of tile republican Communist Parties as
a source of political iegtimacy forcing them to hold a particu
larly strong hand on this topic in education.
The way in which the memory of the Second World War was
presented in school duritg the Tito era had a number of short19. Diana Plut etal., Vrednosni sistem osnovnoko1skih dugbeniko, Psiholoska istrazi
vanja 4 (1990): 141204; and Ru2ica Rosandi and Vesna Peti, edt., RatniPvo, p.519
otizam, patrijarhalnost (Beorad: Centar za antiratnu akciu, 1994. 3954.

20. As Carol Lilly has shown, quarrels about textbooks appeared rather early between
the republics and central state institutions, even during tise period of strong central
ism in the late 1940s. Carol Lilly, Problems of Persuasion: Communist Agitation and
Propaganda in Post-War Yugoslas is, 19441948, Slavtc Review 53:2 (l994: 395l3.
These debates were obviously conflicts over decision-niaking resources but hsd little
impact on the patterns of dcccripticin and interpretatton which in most part remaineJ
uniform in their basic assumptions.
199
comings and consequences that went beyond dubious and biased
interpretations. Three of these consequences are of particular

importance to me, at least from the perspective of developments
following Titos death. The first one is the description of the war
based on a strictly dualistic, even Manichaean, portrait. While even
academic historians since the 1 970s have slowly begun to present
a somewhat more sophisticated picture of the partisans oppo
nents and the noncommunist actors during the war (without,
however, changing their basic evaluations), textbooks have
adhered to a dogmatically simplified dichotomy of revolution
aries (i.e., the partisans) and counterrevolutionaries (ranging
from Croatian Ustaa and Serhian Chetniks to native quislings
and the bourgeois government in exile), reserving not just polit
ical legitimacy but also the good virtues and ethics only for the
so-called revolutionaries.
A second shortcoming of the picture presented in the classroom
and for public consumption was the tendency to dc-ct hnicize the
war on Yugoslav soil. In describing the events of the war pre
dominantly from a class perspective, as a war between commu
nist partisans and all kinds of bourgeois, this approach succeeded
in ignoring or at least downplaying both the wars ethnic dimen
sion and its dimension as a civil war. These features of the war could
at best be read between the lines of textbooks; they were never
made an explicit topic for historical learning and public discourse.
Indeed, each mention of civil var in Yugoslavia during the Sec
ond World War met with resistance, criticism and condemnation,
as was recognized only in the early 1990s.21 It was not so much,
as Serbian critics later claimed, that a discussion of the Ustaa ter
ror against the Serbs had been suppressed in the schools and in
public knowledge during Titos rule. Neither was it the case, as
the Croats claimed, that Croats as a nation were collectively made
responsible for various war crimes. It was more an attempt to
exclude all ethnic aspects from inclusion in the official memory
of the war.
According to the class approach, it was the bourgeoisie on all
sidesSerbian, Croatian, Slovenianthat was held responsible for
21. Islirol
ub Vaiit, Oslohodilaiki di gra]janski rat. Tokoviistorijc 12 (1993): 173.
1
200
WYa, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
ethnic violence and
war
22 leaving out, of course, the ques

crimes,
tion of partisan violence, which reached considerable proportions

toward the end of the war. The ethnic dimension of the war was
mentioned primarily as an underlying assumptions in schools or

where public knowledge was concerned; not surprisingly, it was
exactly this issue that, time and again, sparked serious controversy
among historians of different ethnic backgrounds, particularly
Serbs and Croats, and quickly developed into nationalist battles
among historians and often lead to direct Party intervention to stop
the conflicts.
This way of dealing with the war was,
course, intended to
support the official ideology of bratstvo i jedinstuo (brotherhood
and unity) and to avoid recognition of the fact that national antag
onisms could be fueled by historical memories. The price for this
kind of guided memory, however, was that a crucial dimension
23 This had
of the memory of the Second World War was frozen,
at least two consequences, which turned out to be dramatic dur
ing the process of the countrys dissolution. First of all, it produced
a fragmented memorya phrase that has recently been used in
discussions of the historical memory of the war in German soci
24 but that is also appropriate to describe the situation in Titos
ety
Yugoslavia. Out of the complex character of the war in Yugoslavia
as an antifascist resistance movement and a social class war, but
no less as an interethnic and even intraethnic war, only one dimen
sion existed in the ofhcial memory: the war as a national libera
tion war and a socialist revolution as the Second World War was
of
22. The following textbooks were used during the late 70s in Serbia, Croatia, md Sb e
nia: laconic n.sjnovijeg doba 70 iVnaired gunna.r:;c (Beograd, 1973; isori;a sani t
jeg doba xc IVrazned gimnaxije (Beograd, 1976); lswnija xc Viii, razsrd ino or
ikole (Beograd, 1976); Istons,ja xc Viii. naz red osnovne ako1e (Beograd, 1973 Pu s
jest 2. Udibenik za ussnjereno obrazavanje, 3rd ed. (Zagreb, 1988): Zgods 0107 71
osmi nazred osnovnih ml (L juhljana, 1969); and Zgodovina 70 05011 taxied razsed
(Ljubljana, 1976). It is interesting, but no less signifieant, that it was the Slovcnusn
textbooks that offered the most information on, for example, the Jasenos ac con
centration camp. The Croatian and the Serbian texts obviously wanted to as oid mak
ing this topic a matter for discussion in the two republics that were the most actis:tv
involved.
23. Bette Denieh, Dismensberiiig Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies sod the S\ inbo!::
Revival of Genocide, Am lican Ethnologist 21:2 (1994: 36)C.
24. Peter Steinbach, Die Vergegenwirtigung von 1ergangenem. Zum Spannungss erhaittois
von individueller Erinnerung und ffentlichem Gedenken, ,4us Poirtik nod Zc:t
gcschichte 34 (1997): 313.
2D1
officially labeled in historiography and in the political language.

Its characterization as a war of each against everybody
25 was
largely ignored. It was therefore a highly selective memory, one
that excluded parts of the society from official remembrance and
produced a gap, perhaps even a conflict, between what some of
the society remembered in private and what was officially remem
bered in public.
Second, this way of dealing with the history of the Second World
War in many respects produced a vacuum of memorywhite
spotsthat could be left untouched only as long as a monopoly
on memory existed. The spots were easily filled by others when
the Communist Party lost its monopoly on discourse and inter
pretation in the late 1980s. The often cynical topic of the genocide
of Serbs during the Second World War could be discussed then only
because education and academic historiography had avoided an
open, unrestricted discussion of this aspect of memory in former
decades. Bringing it into the open ignited the political controversy
between the Serbs and Croats during the countrys decline in the
1980s.
Finally, there is a third crucial weakness of the official war mem
ory that needs to be mentioned. The catalog of cognitive values
through which the Second World War was remembered in schools
and by the public reflected values that some critics have correctly
called a knightly or even a belligerent, morality (vitezki
rnoral or ratnzck, ?noral.)
26 [he quantitative share of war events
and war descriptions found in textbooks and school programs
showed the importance politicians and educational bureaucrats gave
to the memory of wars. The Serbian sociologist Vesna Pei cal
culated that 58 of 90 texts included in the elementary-school cur
ricu lum during the 1980s dealt with wars (a large share of them with
the Second World War.) About two-thirds of all personalities
mentioned in these textbooks were described as war heroes, while
only 25 percent came from science, culture, or politics, as Peis
colleague Dijana Plut calculated. History textbooks that covered
the period since 1917 also dedicated up to 50 percent of their con
25. Slubodan Ini. Jedan iii viie ratova. Tokovi istorije 12 (1993): 1371.
26. D. Plut et aL Vrednosni sistcm, 19S; R. Rosandh and V. Pe1i, Rarnistvo, 55.
202
Wa,; Memory, and Education in a Jragmented Society
tent to the events of the Second World War, with a great deal of
this material concentrating explicitly on military events and the
description of battles. Qualifying the cognitive values behind these
descriptions in greater detail, a Belgrade-based study group in the
late 1980s came to the conclusion that such values as the love of
freedom (slobodoijubivost) were interpreted exclusively as free
dom from foreign domination, not necessarily as freedom of the
individual in the sense of the values of a civil society. Boldness
(brabrost) and fighting spirit (borbenost) ranked among the top
four values transmitted by textbooks. The partisans (and only they)
were made the prototype of these virtues and an example of moral
27 The cognitive values transmitted b this
ity for each generation.
kind of war memory were, in fact, no less than the traditional patri
archal values, which, especially among the Serbian population, had
a deep-rooted and long tradition in pre-Yugoslav and pre-social
28 While the textbooks did not ignore the cruelty of the
ist times.
war and its tragic consequences for the individual, death appeared
largely to be a necessary sacrifice that must be made for ones com
munity. In looking at the memory of the Great War in European
countries, George Mosse has argued that even the description of
suffering and the tragedy of war can result in a trivialization in which
29 The
the acceptance of war is seen as something that is inevitable,
same argument can be made for the Yugoslav textbooks and their
way of dealing with the Second World War. Communist education
thus used traditional values as its cognitive basis, albeit within a
new, socialist context.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what effect this kind
of education and public discourse on the war had on people and
their mentality. Reliable methods of measuring the influence of edu
cation on historical consciousness are rare, and empirical evidence
is difficult to extract. In addition, even where hard data can be col
27. As an example of a mid-197Ds history textbook that exphcitlv makes the partisan
morality the basis of our socialist morality, see Istora napsoz:iicg doba za JVrazrcd
gimnazije (Beograd, 1976), 117.
28. B.Trebjesanin, Patriotzam. 86f; Zagorka Golubovi, Nekeliko teza o teorijskins pret
postavkama za slom Jugoslavije, RaspadJugoslav:je (Belgrade: Institut ca filozofiju
i drutvenu teoriju, 1994). 3638.
29. George L. Mosse, Kriegserinnerung und Kriegbegcisterang in 2s1 van der L:nden.
and G. Mergner, eds.. Krwgsfiibrnng und mentak Krrcgs:orbcreztuitg iBerlin: Duncker
& Humblot, 1991). 28.
203
lected, any correlation between education, historical consciousness,

and political behavior is highly speculative. Simple explanations
should therefore be avoided, especially with respect to Yugoslavia.
The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody war were not caused
by historical memory or by education. However, the way in
which the Second World War was remembered through education
and in public knowledge may well have influenced the political
events that led to the violent clashes of the early 1990s.
First, there was the omissions of historical education in deal
ing with the war in the classroom as well as in the general pub
lic under Tito that paved the way for historical memory to be
used for nationalist mobilization. The fragmented and selective
memory, with all its hidden and ignored stories, left niches for
subversive memories, which, under the circumstances of polit
ical disintegration and economic and social crisis, were vulner
able tQ manipulation. Charles jelavichs conclusion, drawn from
examining nineteenth-century south-Slav textbooks, that edu
cation did not prepare students to live in a common state after
the irst World War,
can easily be applied to the Tito period.
3
Ihe historical memory of the Second World War was never a mat
1cr (1 unrestricted discussion. Furthermore, there was never a
disc iursc on how a multietli nic society whose population con
sstc I of extremely divergent individual and collective memories
oulcl manage this complex legacy sufficiently to come to terms
with its complex past. Failings in both the political and the his
torical culture proved to be a fundamental obstacle in making
social memory a matter of integrating the society. The nonexis
tence of a pluralist academic and public discourse in the Yugoslav
society, which characterized Titoism despite its apparently lib
eral elements, prevented the formation of a historical con
sciousness that would block the political misuse and manipulation
of history. In the end, the deficits of a rational and critical his
torical memory were the price the Party had to pay for its use
of the memory of the Second World War exclusively as an
instrument of its legitimacy.
Second, the way in which the war was memorialized through
3 . ( arlcJelavich, Nationalism as Reflected in e1xth,oks of South Slays in the 19th
( nturv, Canadian Review o[Naiiona/icm l6:1-2 (1959): 28.
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 Titcis Yugoslavia

lost its role and its sense when the state and the system this mem
ory had to legitimize came under pressure during the second half
of the 1980s. As in other socialist countries of Eastern Europe at
this time, for the Yugoslav public historical memory became a
resource for questioning the system and its ideology as well as the
impetus for political change. While a stubborn Titoist party lead
ership was still trying to defend the official memory by fighting
an increasingly losing battle against all tendencies toward offend
ing the legacy of Tito and the Peoples Liberation War, a public
discourse that emancipated itself more and more front former
restrictions began to develop. 1 hroughout the long process of the
countrys political and economic crisis in the late 19$Os, the Party
lost its control over memory and the public, opening the floor to
the formerly secret stories. Writers, more than academic histo
rians, were the first to embrace those topics in order to question
the Communist Partys claim to historical legitimacy. The Partys
Stalinist past and its policy of fierce repression, particularly dur
ing the years of socialist transition in 1944 to 1948, were among
the first topics to be addressed by this dissident historical dis
course, proving wrong the Partys supposed platform of an anti
Stalinist legacy on which Tito and the Yugoslav communists had
31 Once this
built their legitimacy during the previous forty years.
-
31. Robert Hayden, Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery of \X.srtime Msssacres
0 islavia, in Ruhie Watson, ed .,Mennv, Jhston
Late and PostCommunist Yu
205
ii:
.i9
step had been taken, it was only a matter of time before the
untouchable role of Tito himself was challenged.
32 Soon the Sec
ond World War would become a matter for discussion, targeting
yet another issue that was crucial to the Partys legitimacy. With
political controversies among the Yugoslav republics becoming
more radical toward the end of the 1980s and with the search for
political alternatives questioning more and more not just the
countrys socialist order but the Yugoslav state itself, the histori
cal discourse soon took the direction of a much more fundamen
tal revision of the historical memory. With politics spurring the
disintegration of Yugoslavia in favor of separate nation-states, the
historical memory became increasingly nationalized. Together with
the Yugoslav state, its institutions, ideology, and political order,
the historical memory fragmented and disintegrated.
From the outset, remembering the Second World War in this
process of nationalizing memory gained particular relevance.
Unlike other countries, such as Germany where the memory of
the war was more in danger of losing significance and weight in
public discourse, in the former Yugoslavia the memory of the war
became one of the major subjects of public discussion. Both the
intensity and the tone of the discussion quickly reached such a level
of polemics and bitterness that some foreign observers described
it as a strange obsession with history.
33 The media played a lead
ing role in this forum, and historians and intellectuals took part
in it, creating a historical discourse in which the borderline
between academic historiography and a nonprofessional histori
caijournalism rapidly began to disappear. This public debate soon
went beyond scientific disputes. becoming part of the politics of
ethnic confrontation itself. Before long, the memory of the Sec
ond World War had turned into political capital exploited by
the political elites. Both the post-Titoist, but communist, leaders
(such as Slobodan Miloevi) as much as the pluralist, but nation
alist, leaders (such as later Croatian president Franjo Tud iman) used
Opposition Under State Socialism, (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1993),
16R70.
32. Tb resolution by the intellectuals assottated with the Serhian Academy of Science to
reexaniinecritically the historical role of josip BrozTito, Danas 16.8 (August 1988):
24
33. Warren Zimmerman, The Last Amha.ador, Foreign 4/fairs 74:2 (1995): 3.
206
Wa Al emory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
historical memories, not just of the Second World War, to advance

their own political ambitions. Just as a common memory of the
war had played a central role in legitimizing the common Yugoslav
state, the separate and diverging memories were now used to sup
f the
port the policy of the countrys dissolution. The memory 0
war
that
new
the
for
people
last war thus contributed to preparing
was to come.
The practice of reconstnlcting and (mis-)using the memory of
the Second World War for political confrontations was the most
intense in Serbia and Croatia. In Serbia, the memory of the war
was only one aspect of a much deeper attempt to construct a new
historical identity. The political background of reshaping of
national identity is well known and does not need to he described
in detail. During the long and painful decade of political and eco
nomic crisis following Titos death and the outbreak of ethnic
conflicts in Kosovo in 1981, parts of the Serbian party elite and a
majority of leading Serbian intellectuals began to articulate the view
that Serbia and the Serbs had been disadvantaged by the countrys
federal order and the basic principles of Titos nationality poli
tics. Because the Serbs were living in three republics and enjoyed
only a limited sovereignty in their own republic, due to the exis
tence of the two largely autonomous provinces of Kosovo and
Vojvodina within Serb territories, it was argued that Serbia and
the Serbs had been discriminated against politically, economically,
and, most of all, as a nation. The famous Memorandum of the
Serbian Academy of Science of 1986 gave the most comprehen
4
sive view of this feeling of Serbian deprivation in Yugoslavia:
Despite the fact that the memorandum did not gain official polit
ical status, its basic arguments soon became a consensus among
the Serbian public gaining political support when Miloevi came
to power in 1987.
In the context of the political discussions on Serbia and its posi
tion in the former Yugoslavia, intellectuals and politicians promoted
a pattern of Serbian identity that, in short, was based on a portrait
of Serbian history in which Serbs had always been victimized by
others, had always been in danger of physical annihilation
34. Vasilije Krestii, ed.. .lfemnrandum S,4sTU (Bclradc. I 996(.
East Ewropean Politics and Societies
207
including the threat of genocideand had therefore always been

forced to fight for their survival and their freedom.
It was a picture that the former American ambassador William
Zimmerman, frustrated by the political events during his term of
office, described as the lugubrious, paranoid and Serbocentric
view oi the past. to blame everybody but themselves for what
ever goes 36
wrong. This picture was most explicitly expressed
by Dobrica osi, the Serbian writer and a temporary Yugoslav
president in whose essays and writings Serbs were almost exclu
sively reduced to a fate of constant suffering and betrayal,
while also to one of militant striving for freedom.
This was
a historical autostereotype, one that revolved around an almost
sacral collective suffering but, nonetheless, included an extraor
dinary heroism. The historian Radovan Samardi a widely rec
ognized specialist in medieval and early modern Serbian history
who was himself involved in the historiographic nationalism of
the late I 9
80s and early I 99
0s, expressed this historical self-image
in the tradition of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. As
Samardi put it, the lesson the Serbs learned from history was
that without death there is no resurrection, and without suffer
ing and pain there is no freedom, neither individual nor collec
38 Wars and military virtues played a crucial role in this
tive.
historical autostereotype, becoming not only the backbone of the
nations history but an integral part of the Serbian national char
acter. These virtues were therefore not only a subject of myths
and epic poetry but they were declared to he a principle of eth
.
35. On historical self-image, see Ivelin Sudamov, Mandate of History: Serbian

National
ldenti and Ethnic Conflict in the Former ugoslavia, its John S. Micgiel, ed., State
and oition Building in East Central [urope: Contemporary Perspectives (New York:
Columhia Unisersitv, 1996), 1737; Wolfgang Hdpken, Geschichtc und Gewalt.
Gesclsiclstsbewuf(tsein ins ugoslass nelsen Konfiikt, Internat innate Schulbuch
frschung_lntcrsiatio,ial Textbook Rscarcl, 15:1 (1993): 5573; Nebojia Popov, Sipski popnhisam. Od snargmalne do iIniznantne pojs cc (Beograd, I 903), 16. A typical
example of historical self-image is \ cselin Djurctit, Razaranje Srova u XX.veku
(Beograd, SANU, 1992).
36. Zimmerman, The Last Ambassador, 3.
37. Numcrous exansples of this can be found in Dobrica ijosii,

Spskopiiasjedc,nokratsko
pitan;c (Belgrade: Politika, 1992), 26, 32, 36, 39,43, 148; Dobrica Cosi, Prosnene (Novi
Sad: 1)ncvnik, 1991), 221. 241.
38. Radovan Samard%id, 0 istorijsko sudbini Srbo, Zadulnna
Miloia Crnjanskog: Ser
bia i komentari za 1990/91 (Belgrade, 1991), 16584. For similar quotations from
Samard;i)s numerous interviews an] statements during tie late SOs and early 90s,
see ibid., Na ruhu istorije (Belgrade: Srpska Knjilevisa Zadruga, 1994), 191.
208
Wa, iIiernor, and Education in a Fragmented Society
nic being, as the Serhian sociologist Nehoja Popov has noted

identity.
in a critique of Serbian 39
lav Serbian identity was based
postYugos
In the end, then, the
largely on the same militant cognitive values that characterized the
Tito era. But while the virtues of the Titoist regime were noneth
nJ
5
nic values, symbolized by the partisans tradition in the Sec
World War, they were now drawn from an apparently specific Scr
bian tradition, one that went beyond the experience of the war and
sharked back to medieval and premodern Serbian history. It was,
as Radovan Samardi summarized it, the tradition of the so-called
vitezka Srbija (the knightful Serbia) of the medieval period
and of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, which through
out history had made up the Serbian national character, and from
which the countrys values and morals should he drawn even in
present. Of course, this kind of promoted historical identity
the 4
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
c. Popos. cd,,
rata. 7iaurna I katarza u istorijskom pamCen;u (Belgrade: Rcpohlika, 1992), 8993.
40. Radovan Samard9it, Aristokratska vertikala u srpskoj istoi.iji, Srbi u esiopskoi iJV
ilizacip (Beograd: SANU. 1993). 923; Aleksa Djil.sc. ccl., 0 istori;.koj karakter Sds.
4.
in Sipskopitanje (Belgrade: Politika, 1991 923: and Sainardlii. .[i ruins !stozc. 1
39. Nehojia Popov, Traunsatologija pariqike drtavc, in
173,212, 285.
209
ography; in the largely Miloevi-controlled press, feuilletons cov

ered this topic for months. A commission on genocide was estab
lished at the Serbian Academy of Science: Although this topic had
already been given a prominent place in the new Serbian textbooks
following Miloevis rise to power, educators were even asked to
make the genocide a special subject of instruction similar to that
of the Flolocaust in Israel or some American schools.
The ques
4
tion of the number of victims of the Ustaa politics during the war,
especially those who were in the Jasenovac concentration camp,
dominated discussion, particularly when Croatias secession from
Yugoslavia became more and more likely in 199091. In late 1989,
after a final attempt to open a professional discourse on that topic
between Croatian and Serbian historians failed and ended in total
miscomrnunication, the discussion lost almost all intentions to clar
ifv the historical facts and correct inappropriate descriptions and
evaluations. Among the intellectuals and politicians on both
sides, this topic became little more than a tool for refueling nation
alist controversies with the issue of victims of the Ustaa terror
dissolving into a pointless body count.
42 While figures were
downsized in the Croatian papers, Serbian figures went up,
inflating even the figures from the Tito period, which had often
been questioned by historians.
Why did the Ustaa atrocities come up in this particular situa
tion? Neither Croatian war crimes nor Jasenovac had in fact been
ignored or neglected. It was not by any means a forgotten
(try, and it is hardly convincing, as many Serbs claimed, that the
memory of this genocide was suppressed from the collective con
sciousness of the Serbs during the 40 years of Titos rule.
43 How
ever, within the official concept of a nonethnic war memory under
Tito, this subject had indeed been made taboo as a topic of dis
cussion in public debatesfroni an ethnic perspective. Jasenovac had
been treated as one of many other supraethnic symbols of fas
4 I. SAN U, ed., Sistcm neistina o zlo(inania genocida 1991 1993 godmt (Belgrade: SANU,
1994, 127.
42, Has den, Recounting the Dead, 176-81.
43. SamaidiiP Na ruhi istorije, 258; tbt accusation that this topic had been taboo comes
front the Croattan side, hut from the perspective that ii had alavs been used as a
weapon to discredit Croats. See als Franjo Tud;rnan, Bcspuca histor;ske zbilnostz, 2nd
ed. (Zagreb: Matica Flrvatska, 198. 114.
210
his
cist terror and partisan resistance. With the renewed Serbian
con
nationalist
torical identity which was shaped during the
frontation of the 1980s and 1990s,JaseflOVac became the symbol
as the
of Serbian suffering. It emphasized the self-portrait of Serbs
share
lions
the
bore
who
those
victims of the Second World \Vai
not
therefore
were
and
of suffering and sacrifice during the war,
peoplcs
other
of
to be compared with the victims and the heroism
44 To stress this particular point was to fight against
in Yugoslavia.
45 as Dobrica osi declared
the immoral historism of symmetry,
which
in the attack on the official memory under the Tito regime.
avoided
deliberately
had
in the interest of ethnic appeasement
designating any hierarchy of victims along ethnic lines. Jasenovac
World
in those discussions became not only an example of Second
of
War terror against Serbs and others but a symbol of the threat
genocide against Serbs in generala symbol of genocide as a con
Ottoman
stant factor in Serbian historical fate, starting with the
four
in
policy after the defeat of the medieval Serbian state the
First
teenth century and continuing with the Austrian policy in the
World War, the German and Croatian policy in the Second World
War, and allegedly being repeated by the Croatian policy follow
46
ing Croatias secession from Yugoslavia in 199D91.
historiograph
ic disputes that this
through
only
It was not
memory contributed to the atmosphere of nationalist mohilita
tion. A variety of symbolic forms of re_memoriali7iflg the Second
of
World War were also used. As part of this symbolic revival
war
the
f
0
victims
of
genocide, the mass excavations and reburials
were cer
on both sides, the Serb and the Croat during 199091 Y
pub
tainly the most spectacular and emotional means of directing
as folk
lic memory. Many expressions of popular culture, such
there is some support (.r
44. Given the absolute number of vtctlms bs ethnic groups.
the Yuos.av peopv.
among
most
suffered
Serbs
terms,
absolute
Serbian position. In
gurss in
The
vtetims.
of
share
equal
an
had
Slustms
while in relative terms
sv;etskon ,.ttu Zareh. l9
Zerjavi, Gubris stano::etva JtgosIavi7e ii dugont
45. osU, Promeme, 299.
Knjizctte not inc 716 Sp
46. Vasilije Krestil, 0 genci qenocida nad Srhinsa u NDH,
to the etghteetsth si I
genocide
at
5
attensp
Croatian
the
back
to
dating
1986),
tember
11945, Zadulbmi
194
Srhima
nad
Gencid
Samard2i,
NkoIa
centuries;
nineteenth
Srb:ma s XX U
nab
Gocid
ed..
OpaBl,
Ieter
and
:
Milota Cmjanskog. 231
(Belgarde: Grafopublik. 102).
t
s!acci.Dtncnhc:ng
47. Hayden, Reconnttng tic 1)eatJ, 17279: Denitch,
211
songs and neoepic poems, took up Second \Vorld War narratives,
symbols, and parallels in order to exploit them for the national

st confrontation, something that the Serbian anthropologist Ivan
(olovi has called the ratnifolkior (the war folklore) which
was popular during the years of nonviolent and violent conflict.
48
Among extremely nationalist groups, the Second World \Var sym
bols were copied, most explicitly among the military gangs of Voji
slav eelj who called themselves Chetniks, and the military groups
)ed by the Croatian right-wing front man, Dobrislav Paraga. Even
the everyday language of politics took on a slang-like quality that
was reminiscent of the Second World War. The public disputes
between Serbs and Croats were conducted largely in narrative ab
hreviations taken from the war (for example, in identifying poutcal opponent as Chetniks and Ustaa, and, with the war spreading
into Bosnia, not only referring to the Muslims as Muhadjedin but
ilso comparing them with those Muslim forces that served in the
German military during the war under the name of the SS Divi
sion Handar.)
49 \Vestcrn policy toward Serbia was put in similar
historical perspective when, for example, Dobrica Cosi spoke of
a continuing World War II against the Serbs to criticize the call
for Western intervention during the war in Croatia and Bosnia.
The memory of the Second World War achieved considerable
importance in Croatias public consciousness as well, first during
the years of political activism and finally during the period of mil
itarv confrontation. As in Serbia, remembering the war in Croa
tia was also closely linked with a redefinition of historical identity
after Yugoslavia began to fall apart. And here, too, the memory
of the war came under strong political influence. The Croatian pub
lic felt especially challenged by the way the war had become a topic
of public discussions in Serbia. The polemics about the number
of victims in the Serbian press and in public, and the entire way
48. Ivan (olovt, Bordcl ratnika (Belgrade: Slos ograf, 1993). For other esamples, see 41.0
Milena Dragi6evil esi, Neofolk kultura (Novi Sad: lsd.knji3arnica Zorana Stii
janosila, 1994), 18391: Milica Bakil I layden, Nesting Orientalism The Case of the
Former Yugoslasia, Slavic Review 54:4 (1995): 925.
19. On the question of language during the national t st cool rontatioli and the sr ii
ugodas a, see Ranko Bugarski.Jczik of rate do ml,,, (Belgrade: Beogradski krug, 194).
esp. 79.
50. Coskh Prornene, 232.
212
War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Socict)
in which the topic was treated during the Cold Warlike con
frontation between the two republics beginning in the late 1980s,
evoked in many Croats the feeling that they were collectively
blamed for Ustaa policy. This feeling had been an underlying sen
timent of the Croatian historical consciousness during the Tito era,

and had been put on the agenda in times of national mobilization.
as, for example, during the Croatian Spring of 197071. During
the Serbo-Croatian conflicts of late 198081 and early 1992, the
memory of the war in the Croatian public was grounded largely
in the attempt to rebuke and to counterbalance the Serbian mem
ory. More important. the question of victims, and particularly those
in Jasenovac, became the battlefield between the two competing
memories. During the Tito era, this question had been a matter of
concern for Croatian intellectuals when political and ideological
51 Following a
relaxation allowed them to touch upon this issue.
sensitive issues, The
avoiding
by
strategy of ethnic appeasement
before a
discussions
and the Party leadership had stopped those
disputes
Pandoras box could be opened and historiographic
became nationalist confrontations. But it was not only national
ist mavericks who were concerned about this problem. Even
Croatian historians, far from being historiographic dissidents, had
often been reluctant to confirm the official figures of Ustaa and
52 Now, with political restrictions withering
J asenovac victims.
away, Croatian historians and the Croatian public threw down the
gauntlet, categorically rejecting all former figures as having been
53 in questioning
deliberately inflated in order to discredit Croats.
they had a number
view,
those figures from an academic point of
of good arguments on their side. The most serious recalculations
stanovnitvu SFR) na
51. Bruno Bout Ukupni derografski i neposredni ratni uhict u
2.10 19.
dan 15.111. godine zbog Prugog Svetskog rata, llrvatsk: Ktjt3e:t list
discuton do:
The question of the victim of Ustaia politics also became a matter for
Croatian pres
ing the so-called Croatian Spring in 1971 and was behind the conflicts
ems Srd.
ident Tudjman encountel d with the patty as a historian troni the late 1960
See F. Tudman, Bespuca. 1076.
ho mentions the
52. For example, the way the question is treated by FiktetaJclit-Butit
2nd 4.
official figures but clcarhs wants to avoid confirming them. Ustasc NDH,
(Zagreb: Liber 1978), 185 17.
Bohas. ed.
53. Lubo Bohan, Zaito je potrebno znati istinu o Jasenovcu Ljuho
his dba:e
troverze iz povijestilugm!.i09e 3 iZagreb: kolska knisga. 1990. 329: see also
bJ.
SSO92:
1990):
4.3
Soclct:cs
and
)
Politics
rot
in
EuroIcan
Hayden
with Robert
6:2 (1992): 2071 7. and ibid. 7:3 (1993): 18590.
213
of wartime losses, published in the mid-1980s by a Croatian

demographer and a Serbian historian in exile, came to the conclu
sion that Yugoslav wartime losses were considerably lower than
the official demographic losses of 1.7 million that had been noted
time and again since the late 1940s. Estimating the total wartime
54 the approximation of 700,000
losses at approximately I million,
Serbs who apparently were murdered
million
of
than
I
more
to
in Jasenovac was unlikely. Even Serhian historians who were not
infected by the nationalist sentiment shared by many of their col
leagues expressed their doubts about those figures, without, how
55 For the Croatian
ever, being able to influence public discourse.
public, however, the entire question soon went beyond academic
disputes and was treated in a way that raised suspicions that the
intention was not so much to correct inappropriate historical facts
as to downplay Ustaa atrocities. Later, a not very sophisticated
attempt by president Tudj man to normalize the Ustaa terror as
56 showed
just one of many instances of mass atrocities in history
little insight and could easily he interpreted as a relativization of
Croatian atrocities during the Second World War.
In the midst of nationalist confrontation between Serbs and
Croats at that time, no open discourse on this approach to the wars
legacy took place among the Croatian public. Instead of dealing
with Ustaa war crimes, the topic of Chetnik and, especially, the
partisan terror against Croats during the war dominated the atten
tion of the Croatian public. While the partisan atrocities toward
the end of the war had undoubtedly been a taboo subject that could
oniy be touched upon toward the end of the 1980s, the way this
problem was now taken up in Croatia raised suspicions that the
Croatian public wished to offset those atrocities against Ustaa war
crimes. Against the Jasenovac topic in Serbian memory, the
Bleibur topic became one of the main aspects of Croat war
memories, symbolizing communist atrocities. The massacre of sev
eral thousand partisan opponents in the city of Bleiburg after they

had been handed over to the partisans h British military author
Second
ities was certainly one of the most well-kept secrets of the
the
World War and, indeed, almost a forgotten memory. Within
Second
the
concerning
context of Serbo-Croatian confrontation
of
World War, Bleiburg, which is often linked with an inflation
into
turned
was
57
casualties similar to that reported forJasenovac,
the Serbian Jasenovac myth
against
countermyth
a kind of Croatian
had
in order to underscore the fact that numerous Croatians, too.
Mirjana
historian
Croatian
The
become victims of wartime terror.
Gross, the highly respected doyen of Croatian historiography,
obviously had this practice of pitting one atrocity against another
Croat
in mind when he criticized the tendency in parts of the
of the
the
end
at
killings
mass
ian public to stress the [partisans]
58
war and to forget those during the war.
War did not become a mat
World
Second
the
remembering
But
ter of concern for the Croatian public only in order to counter
the
Serbian accusations. With Yugoslavia coming to an end and
the
of
memory
the
1991,
Republic of Croatia to be declared in
defining
in
war also had to play a role as an important element
to
the entire historical identity of the newl created state. How
remember the former Independent State of Croatia was also a nec
new
essary part of the political and historical self-image that the
perspec
this
from
Croatia had to define. And it was especially
tive that the publics memory of the Second World War showed
neo-Ustaa
a high degree of ambivalence. Despite some openly
the
tendencies, particularly on the extreme right, and despite all
of
reprensentatives
political
high
confusing rhetoric among even
dealing
in
president)
the
the new Croatian Republic (including
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
54. Bob Koovi, rtve Drugog Svetskog Rate ujugoslaviji (London, 1985); Vladimir
erjavi, Gubici stanovnistva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskorn ratu (Zagreb, 1989).
55. Aleksa Djilas, Osporavana zemija (Beograd: Knjibevne novmc, 1990), 175; Srd;an
Bogoslavljevi, Nerasvetljeni genocia, Srpska strana rata, 159.
56. F. Tudj man, Besputa, 187299.
erjavit, Opsestje i osegatomamie abe

57. Regarding balancing those hgures, see Valdimir 2
75.
1992),
Globus,
(Zagreb:
Jasenovca i Bleiburga,
als Idea
58. Mirjana Gross, Wie denkt man kroatische Geschichte? Geschichtsschreihung
titStsstiftung, Osterreichrscic Osthefte 35:1 (1993): 94.
214
Wa, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
215
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
s. Even outside extreme
9
consciousnes
politics and the public 5
and
articles on Ustaa and the
the
books
ations,
ing
public
right-w
the slightest critical
lacking
were
often
NDH that appeared
The suggestion, made by Franjo Tudjman himself, that the
6
tone.
monument for the victims of fascism at the Jasenovac concen
tration camp be replaced by a monument for the victims of total
itarian dictatorship, a move that raised bitter criticism among
intellectuals, indicated a certain unwillingness to
Croatian 6
ground the new states identity in a critical discourse on the na
tions past. Obviously, there was not only a limited intention to
come to terms with the past, but, to use Theodor Adornos ter
minology again, to get rid of the past. 62
Certainly, the memory of the Second World War on both sides,
the Serbian and the Croatian, was little more than a resource for
games. With the cold war between the two
political power 63
republics turning into a military conflict in 1991, the memory of
ous.
Skola i vlast, 1: ras,nus, Casopis aa ku1t:ru dcmocracije 15 (1996):

59. Zlatko
4952; and Dubravka Ugreil, J)ie Kultur der LOge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Edition
1995).
60. Vinja Pavelx, ed., Ante PaveizO 100 gothna (Zagreb: Nakiada Starevi7, 1995); 1 Poar,
ed., UstaSa: dokumenti o ustaskmn pokretu (Zagreb, 1995).
61. Open letter, by Slavko Goldstein, the former chairman of the Jewish Community
in Croatia, in Fei1 tribune (February 1996).
62. Adorno, Was bedeutet Aufarheitung, 555.
63. The Second World War played nly a minor role in the Serho-Slovenian confronta
tion. It did, however, have a certain impact on politics in so far as addressing the ques
216
the war became an instrument for mobilizing people to take up

arms. However, manipulation by more or less unscrupulous
nationalist poiiticai and intellectual elites tells only part of the
story. It hardly explains the tremendous political dynamics that
recalling the war set in motion during that conflict. Obviously,
there was both a need and a demand for a different memory
among large segments of the population. This demand for a new
memory probably had different sources. On the one hand, the
breakup of Yugoslavia simply made a new historical identity nec
essarv. On the other hand, given that a historical memory and a
collective self-orientation are essential for individuals of a given
environment, the new circumstances of Yugoslavias collapse also
demanded a historical consciousness that revolved around the
traditions of an individuals own ethnic group. Not surprisingly,
for this reason, the Second World War was now remembered
exclusively from the perspective of individuals own ethnic
groups. More important, this need for a new historical memory
obviously derived from a desire to remember those aspects of
the individual and the collective memory that had been forgot
ten during the past decades. The many different and contradic
tory memories that had been excluded from the fragmented mem
ory of the Tito era but had often survived as artifacts
outside the boundaries of publicly permitted discourse, as
4 as private memories, in family traditions,
Bette Denich put it,6
or, at best, as a result of unofficial discourses, now came to the
surface. The tremendous political impact that the memory of the
Second World War had during the course of Yugoslavias disin
tegration and the ensuing war (a fact that often impressed West
ern observers as archaic) also demonstrated the power of un
official memory, to quote Peter Burke. What happened, besides
pure nationalist manipulation orchestrated by various post
Titoist elites, was a kind of re-remembering, an anamnesis. as the
historian Lucian Hlscher once called this phenomenon in
65
Freudian terms.
80s was par: of the demand fn:
9
don of partisan terror in public during the early 1
political change that led to the end of communist rule.
64. Denich Dismembering Yugoslavia. 36790.
249(1989): 117.
65. Lucian Hlscher, Geschichte und Vergcsscn, llistrwisrlo Zeitschaft
21 7
IV. Remembering the War and Education

in the Post-Yugoslav Nation-states
As in socialist Yugoslavia, education in the Yugoslav successor

states is also the main channel through which the new post
Yugoslav and post socialist memory will be forged into historical
identity. The reforms of school programs, textbooks, and teach
ing materials that took place in all of the new states after they
declared their sovereignty, without a doubt led to a certain liber
ation from ideological burdens. But in none of the republics did
this lead to an educational system that was free of the excessive
influence of state authorities or immediate political repercus
sions. It was, in fact, just the opposite. Since 1991, education has
in many respects continued to reflect current politics. And, not
surprisingly, the new picture of the Second World War being pro
moted in the educational system strongly mirrors this political
influence.
The changes made in the new textbooks and school programs
differ substantially among the individual successor states of the
former Yugoslavia, both in their intensity and in their content and
concept. Compared with the former Titoist memory, the conti
nuities are most striking in the new Macedonian textbooks. Only
in one respect have post-Yugoslav Macedonian textbooks under
gone major changes. While nationalism, fortunately, has not led
to the same disastrous consequences in Macedonia as elsewhere
in the former Yugoslavia, establishing an independent Macedon
ian republic nevertheless has led to a somewhat more nationalist
political culture. Education in the Republic of Macedonia has
responded to this by placing even greater stress on the unity of
the Macedonian nation than was the case in the former textbooks.
90s, textbooks have been much more explicit
9
Since the arly 1
about including the Bulgarian Pirin-Macedonia and the Greek
Aegean Macedonia in the context of the Second World War than
they were during the Tito period. Apart from this, however, the
breakup of Yugoslavia and the end of socialism has had a
relatively minor effect on the picture of the Second World War as
presented in the schools. Textbooks more or less stick to the eval
218
66
uation and portrait of the war promoted during the Tito period.
for
a com
need
little
The Macedonian leadership obviously sees
explain.
to
plete revision of the historical memory, and this is easy
While the Macedonians undoubtedly benefited from the com
munists nationality policy during and after the Second \Vorld
War, there was no necessity to rewrite the memory of the war,
which more or less gave birth to a fully accepted Macedonian
nation within Yugoslavia.
Changes have been much more substantial in other republics,
with the most drastic consequences occurring, not surprisingly,
in Serbia and Croatia. Serbian textbooks have largely followed
the nationalist discourse which conquered the public in Serbia in
the late 1980s, In doing so, they have shown some remarkable
peculiarities reflecting the specific political conditions of the
Miloevi regime. On the one hand, current textbooks and his
torical education are clearly repeating most of the stereotypes and
autostereotypes that the public nationalist discourse has produced.
Time and again, Serbian nationalists complained about education
that under Titos rule was allegedly forced to pay only minimal
attention to the Serbian national consciousness and thus con
tributed to the forceful forgetting of a Serhian historical iden
67 Therefore textbooks written under the Miloevi admin
tity.
istration responded to the critics by endorsing the same images
and cognitive values promoted by the nationalist discourse. Also.
the basic assumptions of the textbooks and curricula dating from
the late 1980s were grounded in a concept of Serbian history that
underscored the themes of tragedy, betrayal, the danger of phvs
(Skopje: 1996), 5894.
66. See one of the most recent textbooks, lstorca za VJII.oddekme
1 textbooks or with
9
There are no substantial differences compared with earlier, post-19
who have been
textbooks for other grades and types of schools. Even Greek critics, few remarks
relatively
made
have
textbooks,
Macedonian
1991
postfurious about the
sub;ect of dealing with
on the description of the Second World War apart from the
of Mace
Greek territories. They have made more complaints about the geography
wars. See the highly
donian education and such topics as ancient history or the Balkan
Remarks
polemic criticism by Evangelos Kofos, The Vision of Greater Macedonia: in tone
restricted
from FYROMs New School Textbooks (Thessaloniki, 1994); more
istcriogr.sfia,
but no less critical is Sofia Vouri, 1 Balkaniki polemi sti Elawiki scholiki
r Republic of faccdosia
For;tc
the
of
Textbook
the
in
Wars
299326; and Vouri,
(FYROM), 97102.
Krestd, ed,, Ix istorqc
67. Vasilije Kresti, C) integracije i dezintegracije srpskog naroda,
Srba I srpsko-hrvatskich odnosa (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1994), 313.
219
ical annihilation, and the threat of genocide, as well as those of

68
sacrifice and heroism.
Within this general paradigm, the Second World War, however,
gets a somewhat contradictory consideration. On the one hand, as
in the former Titoist textbooks, the partisan struggle has kept its
prominent role, occupying the bulk of the chapter on the war and
being presented in more or less the same glorifying tone used to
69 Obviously, the partisan tradition
describe it during the Tito era.
of the Miloevi administration has not lost its function as a cen
tral mechanism for constructing a historical identity, even with the
end of the former Yugoslavia. On the other hand, this largely tra
ditional picture of the war has now been reconstructed from a Ser
bocentric perspective. The role of the victims as much as the role
of the heroes now falls almost exclusively to the Serbs. While the
general description of genocide in the textbooks suggests to stu
dents that apart from the Serbs there were few other victims of Nazi
and Ustaa terror (with only a brief mention of Jews, Roma, and
a small number of Croat antifascists as other victims), the vic
tims of Serbian Chetnik terror among the Croats and Muslims, not
to mention the victims of partisan terror, are hardly mentioned.
From the textbooks, the reader gets the impression that the parti
san resistance has been a predominantly Serbian one, disclaiming
the Yugoslav character of the National Liberation War which had
This impression of a pre
7
dominated the former Titoist textbooks.
dominantly Serb resistance to occupation and terror is even more
enhanced by the fact that, unlike the former textbooks, the Chet
nik movement of Dra.a Mihajlovi, which in the Titoist books had
been described exclusively from the perspective of traitors, col
laborators, and war criminals, are now given creditat least in the
beginning and in their original intentionsfor being a part of the
68. Duhravka Stojanovit, Serhian Textbooks as a Mirror ol the Time, in Hopken, ed..
Oil on fire?, 1 1538; Rosandi Peii, Ratmsivo, 3953.
69. For an example of a textbook, see Istorija za VIII razred 05nov01 skole (Belgrade, 1993).
70. Even when they are dealing with the partisan war outside Serbia, as, for example, in
Croatia, students hear only about Serbian partisans. As far as the reduction of the
Yugoslav aspect of the war is concerned, already a superficial look at the people men
tioned in the textbooks supports this view: While Tito, who was mentioned dozens
of time in former textbooks, is mentioned in the chapter on the Second World War
only 10 times (and is almost always referred to by his original name,Josip Broz, instead
of by his wellknown pseudonym). the name of the Serbian Cheinik leader, Dra5a Miha
,vit, is menu oned 22 times.
220
antifascist movement. The resistance against foreign occupation

and Ustaa thus largely appears to be a Serhian one, promoted
either by the mainstream of Serbiandominated communist resis
tance or by the national Serbian Chetnik movement. This mixed
revision of the memory of the war in Serhian education, which
adheres to the traditional partisan tradition on the one hand while
Scrbisizing this partisan tradition on the other, is probably an
expression of the ruling political conditions in Serbia, where the
Miloevi regime has since the mid1980s based its legitimacy not
just on nationalism but also on the legacy of socialism,
The most radical revision of the Second World War memory can
certainly be found in Croatian textbooks. Since Croatia gained its
independence, the educational system there has worked hard not
only to foster a national identity but also to strengthen the loyal
ity of the population to the ruling party and the government of
Franjo Tudjman. Croatian critics of educational policy have there
fore, from time to time, opposed the tendency toward political inter
vention and pressure on education in the schools.
72 Historical
education and the rewriting of textbooks are among the areas in
which this political influence has been most perceptible. Even the
textbooks that were published during the transition from Yu
goslavia to Croatia and shortly after the declaration of sovereignty
came under political attack for being a Jugonostalgika as well as
for adhering too closely to the interpretations and evaluations of
the former Yugoslav textbooks. As far as the treatment of the Sec
ond World War is concerned, those textbooks, which had been writ
ten by academic historians, came under particular attack for their
exaggerated criticism of the Ustaa state and its atrocities dur
71. While the textbooks have itot gone so far as to rehabilitate the Chetnik nsovrmetlt, as
has been the case in parts of the academic historiography and the public media, the
picture they now portray is clearly much more favorable than in the pasi. Tcsthooks
arc thus largely following the modest revision of the poriratt of the Chetnikt tha..
example, was drawn by the late Serbian historian Branko Peiranovtc in Rc:ni:sc:,z
kontrarcvoluctja u Jugoahizt.n (19411945) iBclgrade: Rad. 19S3). For a much more
radical rehabilitation of the Chetniks, one that frees thetis. more or less, fromts the accu
sation of collaboration and shows them as representatives of the Serbian nattotsal resis
tance, as opposed to the Yugoslav and socio-rcvolutioaary resistance of the Tito
partisans, see Veschin Djuretil, Razaranjr Srpstva, 17260, As a criticism of the Croa
tian perspective, see Ljuho Roban, Srpska ratna drama Vesclina Djuretil, Kontro
verze izpov(iesiiJugoslavmjc I (Zagrcb: Skolska kniiga, 1989), 399442.
72. For example, Zlatko eielj, .Skola t ziast. 49SI, cmiimcizes tIle Tud;nsan sos crnmcu
for creating a second totalitarianism in educational policy.
221
3 Before long, they were largely replaced by textbooks

ing the war!
that were more in accordance with the historical ideas of the Tudj
man administration. The new textbooks and their description of
the the past, however, failed to give the impression that the gov
ernment intends to use textbooks and the historical education they
portray as a medium for helping students to develop a critical atti
tude toward their own past. The history textbook that came out
in 1992 for the elementary schools, for example, clearly down
played the Ustaa state, its character and its terror. While the Chet
nik and partisan atrocities were dealt with at great length under
the term of partisan genocide against Croats, Ustaa war crimes
were described as the centralist Serbian policy during the interwar Yugoslavia and the Chetnik terror in Croatia. Despite the
fact that such extreme examples, which were criticized by Croa
tian historians and intellectuals, were removed from later editions
and were not repeated in other textbooks, even the most recent
textbooks show only limited progress in dealing with the Ustaa
past in an appropriate way. It is not that the Independent State of
Croatia is glorified; it is described as the authoritarian dictator
ship that it was (though it has not been discussed in terms of fas
cism). Neither is the Ustaa terror neglected, and, unlike the former
textbooks, for the first time it is even described as a genocide against
other ethnic groups. However, a tendency to downplay the entire
topic of terror is still visible. \Vhile, for example, the description
of the institutional order of the Independent State occupies one
page and three pages are dedicated to the Chetnik and partisan ter
rot the question of Ustaa atrocities is given only a few lines of
very general words out of 18 pages dealing with the entire Second
75 Again, this topic obviously is not seen as
World War in Croatia.
73. This criticism was largely aimed at the textbook written by the widely respected his
torian IVan Jelii. Povijesna Itt inka 4 (Zagreb, 1992) and the textbook Moya doenov
esnrk
1
ma (Zagreb, 1991). See Veleotji List (April 1992), Veternp List (June 1992), V
(March 1992), Danas (June 1992), and Glasnik (April 1991) for a description of the
conflict about these books that ended with their withdrawal.
74. Povijcsi. Za osmi razred osno:ne ikole (Zagreb, 1992), 89, 11213.
75. Besides many full-time and part-tinse jails, concentration camps were also established,
and, by reputation, the most well-known of these was the one in Jasenovac. The Ustase
(sic) committed terrible atroehies against Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs. The Ustase also
conansitted atrocities against Croats who did not agree with the politics of terror, and
against communists and antifascists as well. See Ivo Peril, lJrvatska i svijet u XX.
stoljeIss, 3rd. ed. (Zagreb, 1995), 136; see also Pregledpovtjesti hrvatskog naroda (od
222
XVz; Mernor and Education in a Fragmented Society
a major subject for historical education, thus leaving crucial parts

of the more recent past more or less in a kind of twilight. While
the experience of the war with the Yugoslav Peoples Army and
the Croatian Serbs during the early 1990s has certainly favored the
political demand for a more national education in Croatia, this can
hardly be used as an excuse for the way the war has been treated
in the textbooks since 1992. It is doubtful that the didactic approach
that applied in dealing with this cnicial aspect of the Croatian past
will contribute to an education in democracy and the values of a
civil society. If there is anything to be learned from the (highly con
tradictory) German experience in dealing with the legacy of the Sec
ond World War in education, it is probably the fact that only an
open discussion on the memory of the war (which in Germany dates
oniy to the late 1960s) will give historical education a chance to
contribute to the development of a more stable democratic polit
ical culture and a more accurate historical identin
Interestingly enough, the more recent Croatian textbooks,
unlike their predecessors, are also trying to make the partisan xvar
a part of the Croatian historical identity. In order to do so. they,
like the Serbiari textbooks, are nationalizing the partisan past, turn
ing the Croatian partisans into the good guys, while attribut
ing the dirty aspects of the partisan war to the Tito partisans.
There is certainly a good deal of evidence that the Croatian Com
munist Party and the Croatian partisans under the command of
their leadei Andrija Hebrang, were in some important respects
76 Separating the
following a policy that differed from that of Tito.
Croatian partisan war from the Yugoslav one, as was done by the
textbooks, clearly seems to be an attempt to deduce a kind of
antifascist legitimacy for the recent Croatian state from the events
of the Second World War in order to counterbalance the oppres
sive legacy of the Ustaa past.
But it is not only the Serbian and Croatian textbooks that are
promulgating this kind of a selective memory of the partisan war
Vi. stoljela do nalth dana (Zagreb, 1994). 287. Both hooks are supplementary teach
ing materials; they were not designed for specific classes or types of schools.
76. tvo Banac, Wit?, Stalin Against Tito: Comm form Splits in Yugosiav Communism (Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1988), 451 16;Jill Irvine, The Groat Question: Partisan Pol
itics in the Formation of the Yugoslav Socialist State (Boulder: Westview, 1993>.
223
but the Slovenian ones as well. While in general they have devel
oped a more moderate tone and a much more sophisticated di
dactical standard, the Slovenian history textbooks and school
programs have also clearly adjusted their picture of the war to
the new conditions of an independent Slovenian state. Even more
than the Croatian textbooks, the Slovenian texts have almost com
pletcly eliminated the Yugoslav character of the war by present
ing the war from a predominantly Slovenian perspective. \Vhile
in one textbook the war is covered in 96 pages, 32 of those pages
deal exclusively with events that took place on Slovenian soil, the
events of the Yugoslav war are treated as part of the chapter on
the \Var in Europe. As in recent Croatian books, the Slovenian
partisan war is described as being specifically Slovenian, suggest
ing that, particularly in their ideology, the Slovenian partisans had
only limited connection with Titos partisans. While the textbooks
do concede that both partisan movements had the same goal of
reestablishing a socialist Yugoslavia, the underlying assumptions
of the books, nevertheless, are that from the beginning there were
77 Again, there is certainly
substantial differences between the two.
support this, bearing in mind
to
evidence
historical
of
deal
good
a
the charactcr of the antifas
concerning
differences
the conceptual
Party and the
Communist
cist struggle between the Slovenian
years of the
two
first
Yugoslav Party center, especially during the
war. Nevertheless, the way those differences were turned into a
kind of Slovenian separateness during the war is not only some
what artificially exaggerated but was done with the obvious in
tention of proving that todays Slovenian independence has its
historical foundations in the history of the war. The entire new
curriculum in the Slovenian system of education seems to be based
on a plan to de-Balkanize Slovenian history by severing the states
78 This is
common rnemory with Yugoslavia as much as possible.
war is presented
the
which
obviously also the basis for the way in
in the schools, an approach that, of course, is based less on didac
tical concepts than on political interests.
77. Boo Repe, Naa doba, Oris 7$(odovzne 2O.stotcta. Utbernk ,s 4.razred gmnazije
(Ljubljana, 1996), 123239; J. Trunk and S. Nesovi, 2O.stoletc. Zgodovina za ossni
rszrcd osnovne loic (LjubIjana. 1993).
78. Predlog ra7grajenega utnega narta zgodovinc za glinnazije, Zgodovinski tasopis 48:2
(1992), S. 2584,9.
224
War; Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society
V. Conclusion
The Second World War was difficult to remcnther in the former

Yugoslavia. The superficial picture of a victorious resistance move
ment, having the majority of citizens behind it and leading the
people not oniy to freedom from occupation and the reestablish
ment of the state but to a social revolution that differed from all
other East European countries could give a good deal of legiti
macy and support, but it was only one part of the story. This mem
ory of a National Liberation War during the Tito period hid the
much more complex picture of many competing memories that
remained present in Yugoslav society as long as the Party controlled
the historical discourse. The official memory as presented in the
educational system and in public knowledge during the Tito
period did not reflect this plurality of memories, nor did it try to
integrate them. It restricted itself to a fragmented and selective
memory that, particularly in education, deliberately recalled only
those memories that affirmed the political order and the legitimacy
of its ruling party. Most important, the ethnic dimension of the
war and its civil character were left out. While this communist pol
itics of memory did prevent the historical memory of the war
from becoming a matter of serious ethnic conflict as long as the
Party had control over public discourse, memory did become a
matter for political confrontation when the Parts rule finally
withered away and when the Common state began to disintegrate
during the late l980s. The existing vacuum of memories was then
filled not by a more balanced historical consciousness hut by a
growing awareness that it could be used as a source of political
and military mobilization,
The new memory of the war that has replaced the formei official
one, reflects the countrys disintegration and the establishment of
separate national states. While the content and, most of all, the eval
uation of this new memory are now highly divergent and often
incompatible among the Yugoslav successor states, they are 11evertheless characterized by a number of common structural features
and didactical similarities. The most striking of these is that more
or less all republics (with the possible exception of Macedonia)
have strongly nationalized the history of the Second World War
225
in that they view the events of the war less from a ugoslav per
spective than from the dominant perspective of their individual
republics. In a sense, this revision is an attempt to get rid of a com
mon past in order to legitimate a separate present and future. While
this many be understandable from the point of view of current
politics, it should hardly be accepted as a didactic and historio
graphic approach to examining history, particularly where edu
cation is concerned. The end of the common state does not
eliminate the necessity to remember the past as a common one, nor
can this common past be remembered exclusively in terms of sep
arateness. In doing so, the recent textbooks in most of the post
Yugoslav republics have created a new fragmented memory along
not onl ideological, but ethnic, borderlines.
A second common feature of most of the post-Yugoslav text
books is that the public memory of the war is still heavily
influenced by politics. What Mirjana Gross said some years ago
in describing the Croatian Republic can be applied to most of the
other republics as well, and it has not lost any of its relevance today:
As in the former Yugoslavia, history is still misused as a database
for ideological strategies.
79 For the memory of the Second World
Wat this means that school programs and textbooks do not see
the war as a topic for a self-critical reflection on ones own past
but as part of a didactic concept of education whose primary goal
is the enhancement of national identity and the legitimation of the
current nation-state and its policy. This concept of memory can
hardly be expected to turn historical education into the instrument
of a democratic political culture.
The question of how to deal with the war in all post-Yugoslav
states seems to be an open one and should be made a matter for
unrestricted and unbiased discourse. From the experience of the
Titoist past and the more recent, post-Titoist developments, two
principles should be made the basis of this discourse. First, there
seems to be a necessity to achieve an undivided memory. It is
the totality of tales of sufferings that must be reflected in his
torical memory, as the German historian Peter Steinbach has
demanded of the German experience,

50 and that, in my view, is no
less significant for the post-Yugoslav republics.
As long as cur
rent public discourse and textbooks on the
post-Yugoslav republics
continue to memorialize the experience of individual
ethnic groups
and to exclude the experiences of others from
their memory, they
will more or less repeat the deficits of the
former Titoist agenda.
Second, the historical memory of the warboth
inside and out
isde the educational systemhas on all sides
been open to what
J rgen Habermas calls the ambivalence of ones own history.
Coming to terms with the past, as Habermas
puts it in applying
Adornos phrase, always means the ability and
the readiness to
accejt an unconditional reflection of a hurting
This is what
8
past.
memorializing the Second World War in public
awareness and in
education lacked during the Tito period and is
essentially still miss
ing in todays post-Yugoslav memories.
80. Steinbach Die Vergegenwrtigung
des Vergangenen, 8.
81. Jdrgen Habernsas, Was bedeutet
Aufarheitung der Vergangcnheit heute? Die
AlaS
erne-cin unvollendetes Projekt, 3rd ed.
(Leipzig: Reclam, 1994(, 043.
79. Gross, Wie denkt man kroatische Gcschichte, 95.
226
War Memory, and Education in a Eragmentccl Society
227

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War, Memory, and Education

Wars everywhere have always played a major role in historical

0 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies

East European Politics and Societies

bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans can be taken

az Union Before 1914 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990).

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

War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

teenth and early twentieth centuries, were hardly questioned dur

East European Politics and Societies

The Second World War has had a fundamental impact on the

ins Finer? Textbooks, Ethnic Stereotypes and Violence in South-Eastern Europe

XVar, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

While the nineteenth-century wars against the Ottoman Empire

East European Politics and Societies

result, as the Greek textbook analyst Irene Lagani said recently,

For obvious reasons, the memory of the Second World War

War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

eration War (SUBOR) were not just veterans organizations hut

East European Politics and Societies

ply ignored. The role of the noncommunist forces, the partisans

Jugoslawien 9411948 im Spiegel von Gcschichtswisenschaft und historischer Pub

time is Ljubodrad Dinsil, Od tvrdnje do znanja. Prilog istorili istoriograulje o

Wai Mernon, and Education in a Fragmented Society

19 And, while the soof ideological and so-called patriotic values.

picture of the war differed among the textbooks in the individ

otizam, patrijarhalnost (Beorad: Centar za antiratnu akciu, 1994. 3954.

East European Politics and Societies

comings and consequences that went beyond dubious and biased

interpretations. Three of these consequences are of particular

WYa, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

ethnic violence and

22 leaving out, of course, the ques

tion of partisan violence, which reached considerable proportions

mentioned primarily as an underlying assumptions in schools or

East European Politics and Societies

officially labeled in historiography and in the political language.

Wa,; Memory, and Education in a Jragmented Society

East European Politics and Societies

lected, any correlation between education, historical consciousness,

Wai; Memory, and Education in a fragmented Society

education probably fostered values that contributed to familiar

The official memory of the Second World War in Titcis Yugoslavia

East European Politics and Societies

Wa Al emory, and Education in a Fragmented Society

historical memories, not just of the Second World War, to advance

East Ewropean Politics and Societies

including the threat of genocideand had therefore always been

35. On historical self-image, see Ivelin Sudamov, Mandate of History: Serbian

36. Zimmerman, The Last Ambassador, 3.

37. Numcrous exansples of this can be found in Dobrica ijosii,

Wa, iIiernor, and Education in a Fragmented Society

nic being, as the Serhian sociologist Nehoja Popov has noted

39. Nehojia Popov, Traunsatologija pariqike drtavc, in

East European Politics and Societies

ography; in the largely Miloevi-controlled press, feuilletons cov

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

War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Socict)

timent of the Croatian historical consciousness during the Tito era,