Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums: Reframing Second World War Heritage in Postconflict Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia (Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict) 3031102274, 9783031102271

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT

Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums Reframing Second World War Heritage in Postconflict Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia Nataša Jagdhuhn

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict

Series Editors Ihab Saloul, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Britt Baillie, McDonald Institute of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts.

Nataša Jagdhuhn

Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums Reframing Second World War Heritage in Postconflict Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia

Nataša Jagdhuhn Berlin, Germany

ISSN 2634-6419 ISSN 2634-6427 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-031-10227-1 ISBN 978-3-031-10228-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Photo by Robert Leš, © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Most of this book was written while I was employed as a research associate and Ph.D. candidate (2015–2018) on the program Europäisches Kolleg Jena: Representing the 20th Century, and it derives from a dissertation that I defended in January 2020 at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. I take this opportunity to thank all my colleagues, as well as the professors on the Kolleg program, especially my mentor Prof. Dr. Joachim von Puttkamer, who selflessly shared their thoughts and research results. They all contributed to productive scientific discussions and the stimulating work environment in which this book developed. I thank the employees of all the archives, institutes, and museums where I conducted research for being so obliging and for the kindness with which they responded to all my questions. I especially wish to thank Nenad Lajbenšperger from the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Serbia in Belgrade, who gave me access to documents that this institute has preserved on the construction of various memorial complexes related to the Second World War. He generously helped to ascertain the status of the different local Second World War memorial museums, and his expert comments expanded the horizons of my book, especially in relation to the subjects outlined in the second chapter. To all the curators who I interviewed, I wish to express my unbounded thanks and deep respect for their dedication and sincerity during our long conversations, for help with the literary sources they acquired for me, v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for introducing me to a wide network of museum employees and, when possible, for putting me in contact with former museum workers. A great amount of information, especially concerning the history of individual museums in the nineties wartime period, could not have been found in any other way. Some of them read parts of the book as it was taking shape: Vojislav Martinov, Vana Govi´c, Elma Hodži´c, Marija Vasiljevi´c, and Radovan Cuki´c. They have since become dear friends and I am wholeheartedly grateful to them since they all took the time to resolve my questions on the various developmental phases of their parent institutions. I particularly wish to thank my dear colleagues and friends who read the working versions of this text and whose suggestions contributed, both in terms of content and language, to the quality of this book: Srd-an Radovi´c, Olga Manojlovi´c Pintar, Željana Tuni´c, Franziska Wild, and Caroline Fries. For help with translations from Serbo-Croat to English and for proofreading certain parts of the draft, I most warmly thank: Emilia Epštajn, Mark Brogan, and Larissa Mellor. I was honored to work closely with a copyeditor, Dr. Andrew Hodges, who is well-versed in the history of Yugoslavia. Last, but by no means least, my families in Serbia and Germany are the source from which I drew the most support. I owe them the most thanks—especially my mother who has always believed in me and cheered me on during every step of my personal and professional journey. And finally, for the unconditional support and love, especially on the most exhausting of workdays, I thank my husband and my daughter to whom this book is dedicated.

Contents

1

Introduction: Second World War Heritage as (Dis)Integration Tool References

1 6

Part I Museums of the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia (1945–1990) 2

The Yugoslavization of the Museum Sphere Introduction Legislation: Developing a Heritage Policy Collections: Second World War (Arti-)facts Topics: The Ranking of Historical Events Conclusion References

11 12 15 18 20 32 39

3

The People’s Liberation Struggle Museum Introduction Discourse: Role and Message Praxis: Image of the Artifact Theory: Neither East nor West Conclusion References

43 43 48 51 61 67 70

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CONTENTS

Part II Second World War Memorial Museums in the Yugoslav Successor States (1991–2022) 4

79 79 81

Broken Museality Introduction Revision: Raising a Heritage Dissonance War: Second World War Memorial Museums on the Front Lines Ethnonationalization: (B)ordering Second World War Memories Conclusion References

105 120 133

5

Curating (in) Transition Introduction Distancing Museum Documents from Their Ideological Links Second World War History Through the Lens of the Nineties The Pedagogical Function of “Time Capsule” Exhibitions Conclusion References

145 145 147 153 161 168 171

6

Exhibitions as Dysfunctional Mosaic Narratives Introduction Croatia: The Jasenovac Memorial Museum Republika Srpska: The Museum of Old Herzegovina Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session Serbia: The Museum “21 October” Conclusion References

175 175 179 194

Conclusion: Transitional Metamuseology References

245 249

7

Index

93

205 217 231 238

251

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1

Map of the NOB Museums and Houses in Yugoslavia (Map © Nataša Jagdhuhn) The Museum of the first AVNOJ session in Yugoslavia (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of the Una-Sana Canton. © Museum of the Una-Sana Canton) Wall installation—A photo wallpaper print of children at play (Museum “Lipa Remembers”) (Reproduced with permission of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka. Photo © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka) Wall installation—rows of German helmets (Museum “Lipa Remembers”) (Reproduced with permission of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka. Photo © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka) The Memorial house “Battle on Sutjeska” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) The panel dedicated to the Worker’s Battalion. The Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) An item from the permanent exhibition at the Museum “Srem Front” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) The Museum “Battle on Batina” before the renovation (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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58 59 95

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7

Fig. 5.8

Memorial house at Petrova Gora (Photo 2012 © by Sanja Horvatinˇci´c) Fresco painting by Krsto Hegeduši´c damaged by unknown perpetrators. Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) The building of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 (Reproduced with permission of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo © History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina) The map of the Second World War memorial museums and memorial houses that were damaged or destroyed during the 1991–1995 wars or immediately after the wars (i.e., in 1995–2000) (Map © Nataša Jagdhuhn) Map of the Second World War memorial museums, houses, and exhibitions in the successor states of Yugoslavia (Map © Nataša Jagdhuhn) The central part (historical stage) of the permanent display of the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session at the Una-Sana Canton Museum (Photo © Davor Midži´c [curator of the Una-Sana Canton Museum]. Reproduced with the permission of the Una-Sana Canton Museum. Photo © Una-Sana Canton Museum) The introductory panel to the exhibition Užice Republic (Photo 2017 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Memorial area in Prnjavor (Photo 2022 © by Jelena Fužinato, 2022) Memorial area in Prnjavor (Photo 2022 © by Jelena Fužinato) Museum “Srem Front” (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Museum “7 July” in Bela Crkva (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Maquette of the interior of the Museum “Lipa remembers” (1968–1989) as an exhibit in the Memorial Centre Lipa Remembers (since 2015) (Photo 2017 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Exhibition space in which photographs of the massacre are displayed, accompained by an audio of Danica Maljavac (former curator) speaking (Reproduced with permission of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka. Photo © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka)

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148 152 159 160 163 163

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.7

Fig. 6.8

Fig. 6.9

Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11

Fig. 6.12

The monument Stone Flower at Jasenovac Site (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial. Photo © Jasenovac Memorial Site) Dušan Džamonja’s sculpture Relief Dedicated to the Victims of Fascism in Jasenovac (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site. © Jasenovac Memorial Site) First permanent museum exhibition—1968 (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site.. Photo © Jasenovac Memorial Site) Second permanent museum exhibition—1986 (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site. Photo © Jasenovac Memorial Site) The glass plates exhibit, which lists each victim’s name and surname (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Tools used to murder prisoners: the double-edged dagger, sledgehammer, axe, and hammer. The label accompanying the exhibited pieces states: “Found in the area of the Camp III Brickyard Jasenovac and in Donja Gradina” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) The exhibit “Ante Paveli´c on the first official visit to Adolf Hitler” as part of the permanent exhibition at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) The Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle exhibition (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Old Herzegovina. Photo © Museum of Old Herzegovina) Memorial Room Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers and Civilian Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Old Herzegovina. Photo © Museum of Old Herzegovina Central installation of the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Central installation of the exhibition Memorial Room Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers and Civilian Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Opening of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, 1953 (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Yugoslavia. Photo © Museum of Yugoslavia)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.13

Fig. 6.14 Fig. 6.15

Fig. 6.16 Fig. 6.17

Fig. 6.18

Commemorating November 29 at the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, 1968 (Reproduced with the permission of the Museum of Yugoslavia. Photo © Museum of Yugoslavia) Central AVNOJ Stage (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) View of the rear museum “pavilions” of Yugoslavia’s respective successor states (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) The panel “April War in 1941” (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Installation dedicated to the victims (Museum “21 October”), outer view (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn) Permanent exhibition of the Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac (Photo 2016 © by “Memory Lab”)

208 213

214 223

228 230

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3

The musealization of revolution (The wartime route of the Supreme Headquarters) The musealization of struggle (battles and uprisings) The musealization of suffering (concentration camps and executions)

24 26 29

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Second World War Heritage as (Dis)Integration Tool

Abstract The Yugoslav wars were waged amid a wave of inflammatory monoethnic, martyr-oriented interpretations of the Second World War, which played out in many museums directly. In a radical way, as is only possible during and after dramatic political change, the exhibitions devoted to the People’s Liberation Struggle have been uprooted from the epistemic base upon which they had been created. Thus, the Second World War memorial museums, as symbols of “brotherhood and unity” in Yugoslavia, became sites of contested memory in the successor states, which enforced both forgetting and resignification efforts. This chapter discusses the roles that Second World War heritage played in defining supranational identity in Yugoslavia and the roles it is playing in representing ethnonational identities during the post-Yugoslav transition. Socialist Yugoslavia emerged in and through the Second World War experience. Joint resistance to fascism and Nazism, as a legitimizing Yugoslav ideology, regathered Yugoslav citizens once again within the boundaries of a new state. Consequently, remembering the People’s Liberation Struggle became the foundational myth of the Second Yugoslavia. Indeed, there was an unconditional premise of a culture of remembrance, embodied in all educational institutions, and omnipresent in all forms of media and popular culture. The political leaders of the revolution and the new Yugoslav state were aware that by naming the Partisan struggle © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_1

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a “people’s movement,” they were “replacing the ideologically objectionable term national with people’s ” (Horvatinˇci´c 2012, p. 85, italics in original). Yet beyond that, they were also establishing the notion of the people as a supranational category, and they legitimized its existence even before the formation of the new Yugoslav federal state. The slogan “brotherhood and unity” was coined during the Yugoslav People’s Liberation War to differentiate between the interethnic policies of the First and Second Yugoslavia. Unlike the integrative concept of Yugoslavism promoted during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, based on close linguistic and cultural relations between the Southern Slavs, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia anchored its cohesive narrative in antifascist all-Yugoslav resistance during the Second World War. The readiness of the Second Yugoslavia to resist nationalist ideologies, and particularly the remnants of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was viewed as a centralized state under Serbian domination, was transparent in the postwar changes to the state’s name and in the redesigning of its symbols. By the time of the Declaration on the Promulgation of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (November 29, 1945) the monarchy had been abolished and King Peter II and the Karad-ord-evi´c dynasty had been stripped of all rights. The coat of arms of the new Socialist Yugoslavia was composed of wheat stalks tied at the base by a ribbon bearing the date of the Second AVNOJ Session in Jajce (November 29, 1943), while on the tops of the wheat stalks a five-pointed star was placed. The five torches (representing the five Yugoslav nations) were placed in a slanted position in the middle and their flames combined to create a single flame. Immediately after the official end of the Second World War, acts of vengeance, persecutions, arrests, the killing of political enemies, collectivization, and the confiscation of private property all occurred. Against this backdrop, the Yugoslav authorities started to exact retribution for war crimes from those participants in the conflicting nationalist-oriented ideologies who had survived the first waves of persecutions. Later, not long after Tito’s historical “No” to Stalin (1948), which meant resistance to Soviet hegemony and thus a dramatic foreign policy turn (first toward the West and then toward the [Global] South), this spread to other facets of society, in what was known as the Informbiro period. However, there was never any mention of crimes committed by the Partisans in the war. Consequently, amid the Partisan Movement’s resistance to fascism and Nazism and the timid retrospective treatment of the civil war, which never went beyond branding opponents in the inter-Yugoslav conflict as “fascist

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servants,” the new Socialist Yugoslavia created cultural patterns that illustrated a clear divide between the symbolic right and wrong sides in the war, without an ethnic element. Under these circumstances, any attempts at multivocal and critical remembrance practices were discouraged. Therefore, reaching a consensus regarding memories of the burdensome past and thereby curbing the plurality of collective remembrance on both the republic and federal levels became the authorities’ main aim. The most contested issue concerning the memorialization of “difficult heritage” (Macdonald 2008) in the official Yugoslav politics of remembrance was the war maneuvers of the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland, ˇ commonly known as the Chetnik Movement (Cetniˇ cki pokret, from the word cˇeta, “military unit”). When the war began, this was a nationalist antioccupier movement; however, during the war it became more exclusively an anticommunist and irredentist movement guided by ideas of reestablishing the monarchy and creating a “Greater Serbia.” It collaborated with the occupying forces on numerous occasions. The second sore point in official Yugoslav remembrance was the issue of memorializing the crimes committed by the Ustashe regime. This regime implemented the idea of an ethnically “clean” Independent State of Croatia and used a politics of genocide to pursue this goal during the Second World War. To answer these challenges in the new political environment, leading figures in the Partisan Movement carefully crafted a new public discourse of remembrance organized around fundamental antagonisms: we (Partisans, i.e., fighters) and they (“traitors,” i.e., “collaborators of the fascist occupiers” or “domestic collaborators”). The reason behind the Yugoslav Communist Party’s strong efforts to establish a general Yugoslav remembrance frame lay in the urgency of achieving social cohesion and overcoming internal conflicts that had escalated during the war. The governmental (ideological) apparatus (schools, museums, etc.), without nuance and deeper historical explication, interpreted the Chetnik Movement’s role in the war as being “a servant of the occupier” and “collaborationist.” Equally, the implementation of the Holocaust and the Ustashe regime’s crimes against Serbs were described as “fascist terror.” Through the politics of antagonism, a clear-cut division was ultimately created between “the people” (who were victorious in creating a new state during the war and to whom that state belongs) and “others” (i.e., “domestic traitors”). In so doing, the authorities avoided attributing national affiliations to both perpetrators and victims in the war. The

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Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which created and controlled the boundaries of the new socialist community, drew its legitimacy from the large number of Second World War victims.1 The official numbers of fallen Partisans and civilians as “victims of terror” rose, while the numbers of collaborationists killed were not counted. Between 1990 and 2000, Second World War history became a tool in the hands of political elites, which was used to kindle ethnic conflicts. After the year 2000, subjects began to be discussed that had been (to a certain degree) taboo in the Second Yugoslavia’s historiography. These subjects included the number of war victims classified according to ethnicity and ideology, the Chetniks’ short-lived resistance against the occupiers at the beginning of the war, and the Partisan reprisals at the end of the war. However, instead of revising the ossified Second World War interpretations and opening a space for broadening the range of sources and knowledge on the topic, the public sphere—including the mass media, school textbooks, and museum displays—were swept up in a powerful wave of historical revisionism. The effect of this new historical paradigm in the post-Yugoslav social context, according to the historian Srd-an Miloševi´c, is that revisionists “criminaliz[ed] the People’s Liberation Movement and socialist past, intentionally or not (nevertheless this is a fact), by relativizing the crimes of fascism and collaborationists” (Miloševi´c 2013, p. 24). Similarly, the historian Dragan Markovina has explained the ideological basis of the common revisionist narrative in the post-Yugoslav context as follows: As the antifascist People’s Liberation Struggle formed the foundation of that society, it is logical that the greatest revisionist backlash would occur in that area, where all the strivings of that backlash are completely unburdened by the facts. The less factual support there is, the more the revisionists are prone to passionate rebuttal. They do this in the case of the antifascist movement’s civilizational messaging, or the absolute negation of the reality of the Ustashe state in the case of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, they also do this in the case of Nedi´c’s Serbia and the Chetnik Movement with regard to Serbian and Slovenian collaboration as well. (Markovina 2017, p. 39)2

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The historian Husnija Kamberovi´c claims that: denying the antifascist nature of the war and its mutation into an eminent civil war for power; the denial and minimization of the antifascist council and the negation of the borders defined by AVNOJ [the Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia]; the negation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an artificial formation – that is, Muslims as an artificial, party-promoted nation, etc.; are but some of the traits in the long list of systematically defining a “new direction” that profoundly influenced political and military preparations and was directly corelated with the 1992–1995 events in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Kamberovi´c 2006, p. 32)

The authorities’ interest in creating a new perspective on the Second World War was explicitly manifest in changes to school textbooks and the renaming of streets—and in museum exhibitions too. Thus, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the People’s Liberation Struggle museums, became sites at which the seeds of discord germinated. In competing versions of history, grounded primarily in the concept of collective sacrifice, each of the region’s ethnic groups—Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks— accuse one another of a continual threat to their national identity. Historical and museological research on revision and revisionism in Second World War exhibitions has taken two directions. The first has sought to delineate the memorial landscape contours of one successor state, whereas the second has analyzed a single, specific museum institution. In contrast, by taking a crossregional comparative research approach, this book’s aim is to provide the first systematic analysis of the correlation between the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav musealization of the Second World War. Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—not the entire post-Yugoslav space–have been selected for this research to underline the feature of rivalry in cultural patterns related to the memorial politics that developed in these states during and because of their secession from Yugoslavia, both in and through the 1991–1995 wars. These states also display similarities in curatorial tactics through which these rival narratives have been achieved. The two stages of development of Second World War memorial museums form the focus of this book: (1) their foundation and operation in Yugoslavia and (2) their destruction and reestablishment in the successor states. The first part of this book seeks to answer the following question: What are the basic tenets on which the Second World War

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memorial museums in Yugoslavia were built? The second part of the book offers a reply to the question: How has the museum image of the Second World War gradually changed in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina since the disintegration of Yugoslavia? However, this book’s focus is not on the museum as an institution, but rather on museality as a product and reflection of interwoven relations between society, institutions, and heritage. Museality emerges in the sociocultural values inscribed in heritage by a given institution in a certain society. After Yugoslavia’s dissolution, the link between heritage and identity, that is, between sociocultural values and museum objects, was broken. Consequently, the Yugoslav narrative structure was suddenly no longer present. Thus, this book’s research object is broken museality as a reflection of fractures in the Second World War museal narrative, which were caused by Yugoslavia’s disintegration. In this new sociopolitical environment, new meanings with strong ethnonational connotations were woven into the exhibits.

Notes 1. While the number of Second World War victims in Yugoslavia was massive, the figures were manipulated by the Yugoslav authorities (who increased the numbers) to strengthen the sentiment of togetherness within Yugoslavia by glorifying martyrdom. These figures were also important in foreign affairs through, for instance, negotiations for war compensation. At the Paris International Reparation Commission in 1946, the number of human losses was estimated at 1,685,000. More precise figures were gathered in the mid-1980s. Bogoljub Koˇcovi´c wrote of a loss of 1,014,000 killed, and he estimated the total human losses as around 1,925,000 (for more on this, see Koˇcovi´c and Toši´c 1985). Also, at the end of the 1980s, Vladimir Žerjavi´c wrote of 1,027,000 killed and 2,022,000 human losses (see Žerjavi´c 1989). 2. All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated.

References Horvatinˇci´c, Sanja. 2012. Formalna heterogenost spomeniˇcke skulpture i strategije sje´canja u socijalistiˇckoj Jugoslaviji. ANALI Galerije Antuna Augustinˇci´ca 31: 81–106. Kamberovi´c, Husnija. 2006. Najnoviji pogledi na Drugi svjetski rat u Bosni i Hercegovini. In 60 godina od završetka Drugog svetskog rata—kako se sje´cati 1945. godine, ed. Husnija Kamberovi´c, 25–35. Sarajevo: Institut za historiju.

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Koˇcovi´c, Bogoljub, and Desimir Toši´c. 1985. Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji. London: Veritas Foundation Press. Macdonald, Sharon. 2008. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Markovina, Dragan. 2017. Doba kontrarevolucije. Zagreb: Razlog. Miloševi´c, Srd-an. 2013. Istorijski revizionizam i društveni kontekst. In Politiˇcka upotreba prošlosti, eds. Momir Samradži´c, Milivoj Bešlin and Srd-an Miloševi´c, 11–25. Novi Sad: AKO. Žerjavi´c, Vladimir. 1989. Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu. Zagreb: Jugoslavensko viktimološko društvo.

PART I

Museums of the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia (1945–1990)

CHAPTER 2

The Yugoslavization of the Museum Sphere

Abstract This chapter examines how the dominant discourse of Second World War memorial museums in Yugoslavia emerged, and how it was put into practice (through the creation of a law and the politics of collecting objects from the war). It also asks which narratives did not gain a consensus and become part of the heritage. It is claimed that the basic aspiration underpinning the Yugoslavization of the museum field involved establishing a “musealization of reconciliation” whose goal was to promote the social and national equality that the Yugoslavs had won during their joint resistance to the occupiers between 1941 and 1945. The chapter’s main arguments are as follows: (1) a legal framework was first established followed by the need to train qualified personnel in line with “Marxist–Leninist methodology”; (2) the politics of collecting Second World War objects reflected the Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s aspirations to legitimize the postwar state system; and (3) the development of the People’s Liberation Struggle museum network started out as the musealization of military and political meetings, and it developed into the memorialization of military operations and the use of museums to mark the sites of massacres and concentration camps.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_2

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Introduction The narrative of the People’s Liberation Struggle1 and the victory of the People’s Revolution was a leading symbolic motif used by the postwar “people’s government” of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Höpken 1999) to promote supranational and social unity. The memorialization of Partisan resistance directed the processes of socialist culture building (Sundhaussen 2014), and such memorialization aimed to embed societal norms related to the ethical justification of “socialist man” in the new generations (Archer and Musi´c 2017, p. 44). In other words, it aimed to create and build a political community. At the beginning of their education, members of the socialist youth organization, the Pioneers, pledged a solemn oath (Batini´c and Šušnjara 2016, p. 29) that required them to follow the “noble aspirations” of the antifascist struggle (Duda 2015). Frequently, the ceremony was organized on November 29, Republic Day, often in front of or inside the museums. The oath,2 which was one of the first things children learned in school, stated that young people were fighters for the preservation and further development of the socialist order. When bringing up young people in a socialist spirit, an emphasis was placed on the incompleteness—and even the fragility of—the socialist state project that, because of its ideal of universal humanism (i.e., being a good comrade and valuing all peoples of the world), demanded constant engagement from even the youngest members of the population. The Pioneers’ activities included helping to develop the Memorial Complex “Boško Buha” (built in 1964), dedicated to youth participation in the People’s Liberation Struggle. It was precisely this insistence on the memorialization of ethical values as “real revolutionary achievements” (Karge 2014, pp. 62–65), ascribed exclusively to the Partisan fight, which made the official Yugoslav politics of remembrance rigid, monolithic, and—over time—even surreal. The creation of a new Yugoslav discourse of remembrance required anticipating any form of reactionary nationalism. Even the portrayal of victims required that the victims’ ethnic affiliation be omitted. Monuments and museums were often historical sites of deaths in combat or of civilian deaths: these were the “fallen fighters” (pali borci) and “victims of fascist terror” to use the discourses constructed by the authorities. The first public, government-led Holocaust memorialization in 1952 included the erection of memorials to Jewish victims of fascism in Belgrade,

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Zagreb, Sarajevo, Novi Sad, and Ðakovo. Considering the nature of the European Cold War context of the time, these were very early examples of Holocaust commemorations, which took place before the term Holocaust was used to indicate Nazi Germany’s systematic extermination of Jews during the Second World War (Kerenji 2008, p. 21). The five memorials dedicated to the Jewish victims of fascism were created as part of an enthusiastic push to build monuments to all the Yugoslav victims of fascism, to demonstrate the “common and equal suffering of all Yugoslav peoples during the war as a guarantee of Yugoslavia’s legitimacy” (Kerenji 2008, p. 184). Another point that was indicative of Yugoslavia’s demonstration of ˇ c 2010, p. 181) “coexistence and solidarity among differences” (Cali´ was the establishment of the first Yugoslav Jewish Museum in 1948. Geographically, the exhibition was designed to cover the entire territory of Socialist Yugoslavia, while the periods it dealt with covered Jewish history from when they first arrived in this region in the second or third century ce until the Second World War. The exhibition also included the period of the Jewish community’s rehabilitation in Yugoslavia. Specifically, it presented the Holocaust as merely a historical episode, i.e., as part of a section of the museum’s permanent display dedicated to the Second World War. Nevertheless, special honor was granted to the Jewish participants in the People’s Liberation War, particularly the most prominent ones (Radovanovi´c 2010, pp. 26–28). While less explicit, other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia received a mention that underlined their role in the joint struggle and their suffering during the war. To achieve these goals, the museums passed regulations stipulating that they would build a thematically and territorially oriented network of museums (Bankovi´c 2017, p. 136). This meant that each constituent republic, autonomous province, and sometimes even smaller region, had its own Museum(s) of the Revolution and Museum(s) of the People’s Liberation Struggle (Muzeji Narodnooslobodilaˇcke borbe, hereinafter: NOB museums), dedicated to the specifics of the historical circumstances underpinning each ethnic group(s) dwelling in a particular territory. This move intended to establish a balance between the memorial politics of socialist Yugoslavism and the freedom to articulate individual ethnic and religious groups, such as Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Jews, etc. (Lozi´c 2015, pp. 313–314). Alongside cultivating subtle wordings for describing cultural, ethnic, and religious differences, while also building the discourse of a new,

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socialist Yugoslavism, the primary aim of conveying the joint struggle of all nations and nationalities was to reflect the “moral purity” (Batini´c 2015, p. 186) of the Communist Party, especially in the formative years of Yugoslavia. Therefore, the universalist idea of antifascism—which recruited a wide range of different representatives of the Yugoslav nations and nationalities, while also including wartime noncommunists of various denominations under its umbrella—was politically appropriated in peacetime. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia, as the curator of Yugoslavia’s memorial landscape, sought to practice the spatialization of ideology (Manojlovi´c-Pintar 2008, pp. 287–307) through memorial and museum representations of the antifascist struggle. Building museums on ideas rather than collections (Kastratovi´c Risti´c 2008) marked a new point of departure or a museum revolution. This entailed a new distinctive proliferation of museum institutions defined in terms of their negating the previous state system and its construction of heritage. This meant primarily that the postwar museum boom in Socialist Yugoslavia opened the door to the democratization of museum institutions, as the museums shifted their target group from the elite to the people and “ma[de] it possible for a wider circle of citizens to take part in building and implementing museum politics” (Mano Zisi 1962, p. 27). Evidently, this move by the government was ideologically motivated, aiming to build a new public and implement the system of selfmanagement.3 The museum tradition of storing the private collections of the wealthiest members of society (often those of rulers themselves)4 was replaced with the concept of the “people’s museum,”5 which was adapted for the masses, as was emphasized at the time.6 Therefore, unlike the period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, when there was no consolidating Yugoslav cultural politics related to museums (Krivošejev 2011, p. 296), by building a museum network the cultural politics of Socialist Yugoslavia invested all its available means in the farreaching process of Yugoslavizing the museum field, that is, it developed a fundamental concept and museum institution as authentic points of reference for socialist Yugoslavism. This approach relied on the idea that historical patriotism, as produced through the museum medium, could be employed as a strong ideological instrument in creating and supporting the forces generating cohesion in this new, multinational, multireligious, socialist state (Jagdhuhn 2017, pp. 11–19).

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Legislation: Developing a Heritage Policy The first legal act on museum works passed was the Basic Regulation for the Museum and Conservation Profession in 1947, designed for the entire Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. The first museum laws were then drawn up in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1947),7 Serbia (1951), and Croatia (1960). Just under three years after the war, the first specialized museology journal, Muzeji (Museums ), was established. Muzeji published the official proceedings of the Association of Museum and Conservation Societies, the first of its kind in Serbia and the then Yugoslavia. It was primarily intended for museum professionals, i.e., for the development of museum theory and practice under the newly established social and political circumstances. Shortly after, specialized journals appeared in other republics and even in museums,8 especially in the museums of the revolution. Publishing equipment was developed that resulted in various proceedings being published as edited collections (zbornici).9 The introductory text to the first published edition of Muzeji (1948), titled “Tasks of Museums in the New Societal Circumstances of Our Country,” offered guidelines for museological development. In other words, it elaborated the function of the museum as an “interpreter of culture and social history, whose educational role in society is no different from that of schools, because museums have at their disposal special facilities and tools for widespread cultural propaganda, for the massification and popularization of national culture and its monumental works” (Andrejevi´c-Kun 1948, pp. 2–3). As can be concluded from the first materials printed, the ideopolitical work of the museums in Yugoslavia was never concealed. Museums were portrayed as “an important lever in the enlightenment of the masses” (Kumovi´c 2004, p. 86). The professional and ideological specialization of museum workers was, thus, implied. There were assertions such as, “How is it possible to have a person working in a historical museum who knows nothing of, for instance, dialectical materialism?” (Ðuri´c 1949, p. 4). Upholding the received axioms of the museum mission was guaranteed through an oath pledged by museum workers: I [name] swear by the honor of my people and my own honor to faithfully serve the people, to comply with the constitution and laws and other general regulations, to protect and defend the constitutional democratic

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order of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and the People’s Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I swear that I will perform my duties conscientiously.10 (Cogo 2016, p. 6)

The FNRJ’s academic council, founded in 1948 as the joint Academy of Science, was given the task in 1949 of supervising the research of all science institutions (universities, institutes, but also museums) in the country. Between 1948 and 1950 museum societies were established on a republic level and in 1951 Yugoslavia joined the International Council of Museums (hereinafter: ICOM). The Yugoslav National Committee of ICOM11 was a special body of the Council of Museum Societies of Yugoslavia. This council, which consisted of worker associations from the respective republics, was founded in 1952 as a body coordinating the work of the republic-level societies. Its tasks were as follows: (a) Coordinate the work between member societies (b) Work on the development of museum societies and their coordination, as well as on furthering their activities (c) Develop initiative by opening up scientific and specialist debate in the field of museology and conservation, and help find solutions (d) Publish the federal journal Muzeji, which will deal with museological problems of general interest (e) Take care to properly address class issues and cooperate with the authorities to that end (f) Ensure the establishment and maintenance of ties internationally, that is, to similar organizations abroad, for the sake of exchanging experiences, experts, etc.12 The task of defining the museum concept was an urgent one in the immediate postwar conditions when Yugoslav authorities first recognized the power of museum institutions in facilitating social change. Besides the political bodies that have been listed, the most important protagonist in creating memorial politics was the organization named the Associations of Veterans of the People’s Liberation War (Savez boraca Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata, hereinafter: SBNOR). It was active from 1947 to 1961, while from 1961 until the dissolution of Yugoslavia it was known as the Federation of Veterans’ Associations from the People’s Liberation War (Savez udruženja boraca Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata, hereinafter: SUBNOR).13

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SBNOR took care of veterans’ social benefits (pensions, pension plans for disabled people, flats, health care, social welfare, education, employment) and of nurturing the “NOB tradition” (monument building, marking graves, issuing commemorative medals to war heroes, listing victims, and establishing museums). It was also involved in the organization of Partisan marches and similar forms of youth engagement. The organization made it possible for the youth involved to travel across Yugoslavia and attend gatherings with young people from other republics and with Second World War veterans. They visited NOB monuments, graves, and NOB museums, and they facilitated art and cultural activities (printing, publishing, film, etc.) that dealt with NOB themes. The veterans’ associations completed a wide range of activities. Their engagement in not only establishing but also maintaining the NOB museums is of particular importance here. This kind of S(U)BNOR engagement was at its most intense during the period from 1952 to 1963 when, as a regular committee reporting to the Central Committee of the Associations of Veterans, the Committee for Maintaining and Marking Historical Sites (Odbor za ured-ivanje i obeležavanje istorijskih mesta)14 was tasked with administering the activities of marking and maintaining sites linked to important dates and central events from the war period of the People’s Revolution, which are also linked to the activities of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, the Supreme Headquarters and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, and the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia (Karge 2014, p. 102). The committee’s mission to musealize the locations where the Communist Party had been based for shorter or longer periods during the war, or where they had made important decisions, was part of the process of establishing the first central all-Yugoslav museums. These were institutions with a special status that were governed and funded at the federal level. The committee’s political visions (Karge, 2014, pp. 97–105) were considered by the Expert Commissions for Marking and Maintaining Historical Sites (Struˇcna komisija za obeležavanje i ured-ivanje istorijskih mesta). The scope of their primary activities related to the permanent marking, planning, protection, and maintenance of historical sites (including the establishment of Museums of the People’s Revolution of Yugoslavia and People’s Liberation Struggle Museums) was set at the Third Congress (1957) by the Central Committee of the Associations of Veterans (Horvatinˇci´c 2017, pp. 54–55). The expert

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commissions collaborated with permanent and temporary committees that marked and maintained historical sites, such as the archives of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Military Historical Institute of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, various institutes for the protection of cultural monuments, and conservators’ associations. They took on the task of organizing and defining the work of collecting and organizing historical materials related to the Second World War as archival sources.15

Collections: Second World War (Arti-)facts Alongside mapping the damage suffered by cultural and educational institutions and cultural monuments after the country’s liberation (Petranovi´c and Zeˇcevi´c 1988, pp. 845–854), new institutions for documenting and presenting Second World War history as the foundation for a new socialist “people’s culture” were systematically planned and then built. First, historical sources needed to be gathered. With the support of the Party and the army, a wide range of individuals and organizations, as well as county and town councils, set to work on this task. They collected items such as original documents, publications, works of art, photographs, and weapons. Various other items collected included personal objects and those of prominent war figures, as well as military equipment, flags, etc. They placed a special emphasis on acquiring detailed statements from participants in the war. Additionally, this task also included making maps of places where battles were fought and taking photographs of important NOB sites, including concentration camps, execution sites, etc.16 The Military Museum in Belgrade printed questionnaires that were to be filled in for each acquired object. These Questionnaires for Acquiring Data on Objects from the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle and Old Wars17 were sent to the county and town committees of the veteran associations. Competitions were organized to further motivate them to demonstrate excellent results in collecting historical materials. The collected objects were divided into two groups: “our objects,” which referred to objects from the Partisan struggle led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and “enemy objects,” which referred to items that had belonged to the occupying forces or to units that opposed the Partisans during the Second World War (the flags of all detachments, various weapons, photographs and written documents, various typewriters, radio stations, office stamps, different orders and commands, and operating logs). The objects that

2

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represented the Partisan struggle also included medical equipment (operating tables, stretchers for the wounded, instruments, and even small boards used to heal bone fractures). The aim was to document the evidence and oral histories relating to the Partisan units’ protection and care of the sick and wounded. This was not how the opposing side in the war was dealt with. Therefore, abiding by the humanitarian principles of war was, as the documentation later supported, a unique attribute of the military units in the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and the Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia. The same happened with the documentation that referred to the life of the local populations that helped Partisan units (people working in workshops, printing houses, etc.). This type of data was documented exclusively if it favored the narrative of the local population helping the Partisans. The locals’ difficult life during the war was not documented. Ultimately, direct or indirect participation in the war on the side led by the Communist Party was the criterion determining the importance of war-related phenomena. Art objects created in military units during the war were collected exclusively from the Partisan units. This dedication to collecting war documentation and weapons linked to the Chetnik and Ustashe movements was important—especially in the years when the authorities carried out retributive acts on the surviving supporters of these ideologies—because they were crucial proof of the crimes that these formations executed against the local population (Lajbenšperger 2019, p. 57). Accordingly, Cold War international political relations, as well as domestic political motivations to disclose the Second World War circumstances in the Yugoslav territories, determined an ideologically motivated selection of historical data. This led to obsessive attempts to uncover a range of suitable objects that would support the establishment of a stable state memory. Each object that stood as testimony of the crimes enacted by the “domestic enemy” was also of crucial importance for establishing the paradigm of the “treacherous” nature of the Chetnik movement. Any proof of resistance on the part of the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland in the early years of the war was not placed on the priority list for historical documentation.

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Topics: The Ranking of Historical Events Indeed, how musealization practices were ranked expose which Second World War events, and from which period, were considered crucial in constructing a museum message and an independent NOB Museum that reflected Yugoslav identity. The mechanisms of “the reconciliatory coverup of facts” (Stojanovi´c 2013, p. 190) arguably always musealized those parts of the war history that fitted in with and helped to harmonize a coherent social consciousness and a narrative of a shared past. However, the memorial houses that predominantly commemorated either heroes or Partisan resistance in a certain region (e.g., in a smaller settlement or village) reflect the random, unplanned appearance of memorial institutions that resulted from bottom-up initiatives by individuals or local associations (Otaševi´c 1986). These were of secondary importance in the state hierarchy of remembrance and were allocated less funds. Their establishment is evidence of individuals and groups attempting to meet the authorities’ expectations in a way that was not officially required. These local museums were political and cultural expressions of the self-staging of social need—the spirit of the times and the “duty to remember” (Meral 2012, Fig. 2.1). The difference between a memorial museum and memorial house has never been fully specified, and the use of the terms memorial museum, memorial exhibition, and memorial house was quite arbitrary. In 1971 the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina produced a document named The General Concept of the Network of NOB Museums and Museums of the Revolution in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It defined a “central museum” (memorial museums18 were placed in this category) as a “special type of culturally and historically conditioned institution that uses the scientific method to research, collect, analyze, process, safeguard, exhibit, and publish museum materials from the history of the workers’ movement, the People’s Liberation War and revolution.”19 Memorial exhibitions and memorial houses were defined in the document as follows: Memorial exhibitions are institutions that, following a museological approach, deal with certain themes, events, institutions, or persons from the history of the workers’ movement, People’s Liberation War, and the revolution. These institutions develop teaching and educational methods of working with the public, take care of exhibition and building maintenance, and are mostly annexes of the museum that has made the exhibition display, and that also attend to its further museological enhancement.20

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Fig. 2.1 Map of the NOB Museums and Houses in Yugoslavia (Map © Nataša Jagdhuhn)

Memorial houses are institutions consisting of a faithful reconstruction of an environment linked to a certain event or person to which the house refers. In addition, if further explanations are needed, the museum’s resources may be used to present a historical event or person.21

As with the memorial exhibitions, the above document stated that the primary function of memorial houses and institutions is educational and that they serve as annexes to those museums that established them, taking care of their further development. Therefore, the document defining the NOB museums and the museums of the revolution did not adequately

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define memorial houses and exhibitions, thus leaving room for terminological inconsistencies to arise between them (Otaševi´c 1986). This was because memorial houses sometimes included complex exhibitions (for instance the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska”), while in other cases they only owned copies or original artifacts and opened exclusively on certain commemorative dates (the Memorial House “NOB in Punat,” on the island of Krk is one such example). In certain cases (predominantly in Serbia) the term “memorial” was not added to the names of the houses of people’s heroes. Consequently, from a present-day perspective, given the number of houses that are out of service or are lacking in documentation, it is not possible to determine with certainty whether these buildings had museum exhibitions, or whether they were merely protected cultural goods22 (sometimes only marked by a memorial plaque, while in other cases they had preserved interiors with an exhibition function clearly present). Memorial houses were mainly “ambient spaces accurately rendered to convey a certain historical event or person” (Maliˇci´c 1984, p. 57). One of the reasons why Yugoslav memorial institutions were never consistently listed was due to a “museum boom.” This referred to the unregulated opening of a considerable number of memorial houses or memorial exhibitions thanks to bottom-up initiatives by citizens’ associations and local boards in the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia,23 the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia,24 and the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.25 In turn, this caused difficulties in harmonizing museum laws, terminology, and ultimately the interpretation of the role and function of these institutions. The many memorial houses dedicated mainly to national heroes are prime examples. The houses’ names implied that they were a part of the set of NOB museums, but in fact they were protected cultural monuments without exhibition spaces. Even though there were occasional attempts to make an official list of the museums established in Socialist Yugoslavia (Nikoli´c 1962; Šulc 1984), a comprehensive lexicon of museum institutions at the federal level was never produced. Poor quality coordination between the municipalities and institutes regarding the protection of cultural goods created more obstacles, because many (especially the small) municipalities and local village governments competed among themselves over the marking of NOB sites (these were most often memorial houses commemorating the NOB period of a certain village or town district).

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In the 1950s the issue of building Second World War memorial museums was opened, and the decision was first made that the wartime route along which the Supreme Headquarters moved had to be marked out. This was because those places where the leadership of the Communist Party had reached certain key decisions were important not solely for understanding the outcome of the Second World War, but also for the more far-reaching construction of the future state. These museums were considered as sites of primary importance for Yugoslav collective memory. Their focus on the military political sessions were modeled on Marxist–Leninist museology (Jagdhuhn 2016, 2017, 2021). Specifically, this meant that archival documents, photographs, handwritten notes, quotations, and Party slogans dominated the displays (Table 2.1). After the idea of the revolution had been institutionalized, public awareness regarding war strategies had to be raised. This included highlighting the execution of the Partisan resistance by enemy forces, which was supported by the museum narrative of the casualties of “domestic and foreign fascism” (Tables 2.2 and 2.3). Unlike the museums built on the sites of important political meetings held during the war, the museums on the sites of battles and concentration camps are part of the memorial parks. The reason for this is the change in memorial aesthetics and politics from the 1960s and especially the 1970s in Yugoslavia. This change first came about during the Yugoslav–Soviet split (1948) in which Yugoslav cultural politics turned to the West (Vuˇceti´c 2018). This was then reinforced in the mid-1960s and 1970s when the concept of “nonaligned modernism” (Videkani´c 2020) took root and flowered in Yugoslavia. Socialist modernism, as the official aesthetic language of Yugoslavia, relied upon a specific, nonaligned representation of its position, which was also applied to the memorialization of battles and execution sites. The museums in the memorial parks—unlike those that were not part of “memorial sites”—had the important function of organizing commemorative mass ceremonies. In the mid-1970s two and a half million citizens of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia visited commemoration ceremonies, cultural, educational, and art events, Partisan marches, excursions, and picnics,27 with “the number of visitors in the 1980s reaching four million per year.”28 Museums, as one part of memorial parks, were thus reinvented through the “corporal and social performances of tourists” (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, & Urry 2004, p. 2) who transformed

On July 4, 1941 in Belgrade, the members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee Politburo decided to start a general uprising of the peoples of Yugoslavia against the occupier. In a proclamation written by Ivo Lola Ribar, they summoned all the peoples of Yugoslavia to join the uprising. Across the whole territory of Yugoslavia, July 4 was celebrated as Fighters’ Day from 1956 onward From 1941 to 1943 an illegal printing house belonging to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was active. It printed Communist Party brochures (Proletariat ) and flyers, books, forms, and the first publications of the Central Headquarters (which later became the Supreme Headquarters) of the People’s Liberation Army and the Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia The First Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) Session was held from November 26–27, 1942. AVNOJ was established there as the general national and general party, the political representative of the People’s Liberation Struggle of Yugoslavia At the Second AVNOJ Session held on November 29, 1943, decisions of crucial importance for the establishing of a postwar Socialist Yugoslavia were made. The decision to form a federal Yugoslav state was the most important

Museum “4 July” in Belgrade (1950)

Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session in Jajce (1953)

Museum of the First AVNOJ Session in Biha´c (1953)

Museum of Illegal Printing Houses in Belgrade (1950)

Museum focus

The musealization of revolution (The wartime route of the Supreme Headquarters)

Museum name

Table 2.1

24 N. JAGDHUHN

At the First State Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ZAVNOBiH) Session in Mrkonji´c Grad on November 25, 1943, the ZAVNOBiH resolution and the Proclamation to the Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina were passed. These documents recorded the decision that Bosnia and Herzegovina is neither Serbian, nor Croat, nor Muslim, but Serbian and Muslim and Croat The advising military and political team of members and leaders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the People’s Liberation Movement of Liberation of Yugoslavia was held on 26–27 September 1941 in the village of Stolice. It reached decisions on Partisan war strategy, the organization of Partisan units and headquarters, the marks and symbols of the Partisan Movement (oaths, greetings, the red star, etc.) and the term Partisan as officially denoting the fighters. The Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia was formed, and the Supreme Headquarters in all Yugoslav provinces On the liberated territory of Foˇca (Foˇcanska republika) from January 20 to May 10, 1942, Moša Pijade drew up the Foˇca Regulations, which defined the tasks and frameworks of the people’s liberation committees, manuals for the work of the people’s liberation committees in liberated areas, and a legal document that defined “the enemy of the people” as well as punishment for specific criminal acts In 1944 the island of Vis became a military base, i.e., the military and political center for leading the People’s Liberation War and a center for the far-reaching political activities linked to recognizing the new Yugoslavia

Museum of the First ZAVNOBiH Session in Mrkonji´c Grad (1968)

Museum of the Central Offices of the People’s Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia on the island of Vis (1964)

Museum “The Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle” in Foˇca (1956)

Museum “Military Counsel in Stolice” in Stolice (1955)

Museum focus

Museum name

2 THE YUGOSLAVIZATION OF THE MUSEUM SPHERE

25

The spread of the uprising across Yugoslavia (the historical conditions and formation of the first Partisan units) led by the Communist Party, and the establishment of the first liberated territories in occupied Europe—the Republic of Užice The German operation Rösselsprung was an attack on the Yugoslav leadership, which was in Drvar in May and June 1944. The fights were between units of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and the German Wehrmacht and Chetnik and Ustashe units. Even though the German powers took over Drvar, the central headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia managed to evacuate The mass uprising in Croatia links to the date of July 27, 1941 when the first guerrilla units attacked the Ustashe Gendarmerie in Srb in Južna Lika and Bosanska Krajna On July 7, 1941 (Day of the Serbian Uprising) in Krupanj, Žikica Jovanovi´c Španac, part of the Rad-evo Partisan troop, fired at two gendarmes who were attempting to interfere with a people’s gathering (an event summoning people to join the Partisan fight); this date was celebrated as the start of the uprising in Serbia The offensive on Kozara was a battle that lasted from June 10 to July 15, 1942, where the People’s Liberation Movement and the Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia fought the German Wehrmacht, Chetniks, and Ustashe. In total, 68,000 people were deported to camps (predominantly Jasenovac). The names of 33,000 victims have been carved into a monument in the memorial park

Museum of the 1941 Uprising (1946)

Museum “Kozara in the NOB,” as part of the memorial area on Mrakovica (1973)

Museum “7 July” in Krupanj (1955)

Museum “Uprising of the People of Croatia – 27 July 1941” in Serb (1971)

Museum “25 May 1944” in Drvar (1957)

Museum focus

The musealization of struggle (battles and uprisings)

Museum name

Table 2.2

26 N. JAGDHUHN

Museum “Battle on Batina” in Sombor (1981)

Musuem “Podgrmeˇc – NOB in Jasenica” in Jasenica (1979)

Memorial House “Worker’s Battalion and the Battle on Kadinjaˇca” (1979)

THE YUGOSLAVIZATION OF THE MUSEUM SPHERE

(continued)

The Battle on Sutjeska (known by the German occupiers as Operation Schwarz) was fought from May 27 to June 15, 1943 with German, Italian, Ustashe, and Bulgarian soldiers on one side, and the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army on the other. The Partisan forces broke the German stronghold. The 7,356 names of “fallen fighters” have been carved into the museum walls The Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s Central Committee formed the First Proletarian Brigade on December 21, 1941. More than 22,000 people fought in it and its first commander was Koˇca Popovi´c. The date of the first battle that this brigade fought (near Glamoˇc) was celebrated in Yugoslavia as the Yugoslav People’s Army Day The Battle on Kadinjaˇca on November 29, 1941 was fought between German occupation forces and Partisan divisions within the Užice Workers’ Battalion. This memorial house has the special task of preserving the memory of the Užice Workers’ Battalion, as all its fighters lost their life defending the Užice Republic Between 1942 and 1943 in Bosanska Krupa, the Partisan units engaged in intensive work: building hospitals and large food stores, constructing the military and technical workshop of the Supreme Headquarters, preparing shelters, etc The Battle on Batina was fought from November 11 to 29, 1944 with the Red Army and People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia units on one side, and the German Wehrmacht and Hungarian forces on the other. The Battle on Batina was strategically important for the liberation of Baranja and the further liberation of the whole of Yugoslavia, and it paved the way for the Red Army in its conquest of Budapest

Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska” on Tjentište (1975)

Museum “First Proletarian Brigade” in Rudo (1976)

Museum focus

Museum name

2

27

The Battle on Neretva (February–April 1943) is also known as the Battle for the Wounded. The People’s Liberation Army and the Yugoslav Partisan Detachments fought against German, Italian, Chetnik, and Ustashe forces, in which the Partisan units saved 4000 wounded people The fights for the Srem district with the People’s Liberation Army, Red Army, Bulgarian National Army, and Italian Partisans on one side, against the German and Ustashe forces on the other, lasted from October 1944 to April 1945. The penetration of the Srem Front paved the way for the final liberation of Yugoslavia toward its western regions, i.e., Istria and the Slovenian coast

Museum “Battle for Wounded on Neretva” in Jablanica (1978)

Museum “Srem Front” in Šid (1988)

Museum focus

(continued)

Museum name

Table 2.2

28 N. JAGDHUHN

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29

Table 2.3 The musealization of suffering (concentration camps and executions) Museum name

Museum focus

Museum “12 February” in Niš (1967)

The Red Cross concentration camp was established by the occupational German authorities in 1941. By 1944 it confined over 30,000 people: Jews, Roma, and all those who had resisted the occupation. The name of the museum is linked to the date February 12, 1942, when 105 out of 147 prisoners successfully escaped the camp The Jasenovac concentration camp was active from 1941 to 1945 and was under Ustashe control in Independent State of Croatia territory. Men, women, and children were killed there because of their religious, national, or ideological affiliation. The number of victims in this camp was never accurately determined. The number given in Yugoslavia—likely a gross overestimate—was around 700,000 (Geiger 2011). Jasenovac Memorial Site collected (until March 2013) a list of dates, names, and details for 83,145 victims. According to the data gathered, 39,570 men, 23,474 women, and 20,101 children under the age of 14 were killed in Jasenovac Concentration Camp26 In total, 24,000 prisoners passed through the Banjica concentration camp (July 1941–October 1944). Many were deported from Banjica to camps across Europe. Of the Banjica prisoners, around 4200 have been identified as shot The museum commemorates the horrific massacre enacted by members of the Nazi fascist units and the collaborationists over the population (280 people) of the village of Lipa. This happened on April 30, 1944, and it aimed to stop Partisan resistance in that area

Museum “Jasenovac” in Jasenovac (1968)

Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp” in Belgrade (1969)

Museum “Lipa Remembers” in Lipa (1969)

(continued)

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Table 2.3 (continued) Museum name

Museum focus

Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac 1976)

On October 21, 1951 in Šumarice near Kragujevac, 2,264 civilians were shot (of whom thirty-one survived). The precise number of victims was only determined in the post-Yugoslav period. In Yugoslavia, the Memorial Park “October in Kragujevac” was the site of the greatest mass execution of civilians—according to the data at the time, there were ,000 registered victims. The reason for the execution was German losses (ten dead and twenty-six wounded). According to new research results, in total 2854 people were taken to be executed, of whom sixty-two survived (Brki´c 2007)

memorial areas into picnic sites and environments designed for leisure and recreation. By detecting the narrative patterns through which the state reproduced its own image of the past and vision of the future, one may conclude that the state priority was to build museums dedicated to the idea of revolution and only then came the musealization of sites of struggle, while the musealization of sites of suffering was overshadowed by these other priorities. With the exceptions of Jasenovac, Banjica, and Niš, many sites (such as Sajmište, Jadovno, Topovske Šupe, etc.) of the Holocaust’s cruel wave in the Yugoslav region still have no museum display today. What motives underlie giving more importance to certain events in public memory? Indeed, “Why did the victims of Jasenovac, but not the victims of Sajmište receive a memorial in socialist Yugoslavia?” (Karge 2012, p. 106), and why is it that the Banjica, Red Cross concentration camp, and Jasenovac concentration camp have been marked as museums, while Staro Sajmište, Jadovno, and other former concentration camps have never been musealized? It seems unreasonable to assume that the committee was vigilant enough to mark sites of the Holocaust abroad (Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen), which included Yugoslav Jews among its victims, and to have detached itself from such a task at home. As Jasenovac was the largest concentration camp on occupied Yugoslav territory,

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it seems to have been a substitute of sorts for the memorialization of all Holocaust victims in Yugoslavia (Karge 2012, pp. 106–118). Unlike Jasenovac, the grounds for the decision to musealize the Banjica and Red Cross concentration camps lies in the decision-makers’ objectives. They sought to emphasize the fate of political opponents, especially communists, who ended up in concentration camps alongside the Jews and Roma. Making a point out of the organized resistance of February 12, 1942 at the Red Cross concentration camp in Niš, when as many as 105 prisoners broke free, was particularly important. The Banjica concentration camp, as the largest camp on the territory of occupied Serbia, was also portrayed as a “concentration camp for communists,” i.e., a concentration camp in which most of the prisoners were members or sympathizers of the People’s Liberation Movement. One noteworthy point, which links to the aforementioned “memorial hierarchy” evident in the Second World War sites chosen for musealization is that the Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp” opened late in 1969 “as a smaller memorial room by the Military Academy, twenty years after the memorial displays in the Museum of Illegal Party Printing Houses and the Museum ‘4 July’” (Vasiljevi´c 2012, p. 19), even though all three museum displays were governed by the same institution—the Belgrade City Museum. While sites of execution were used to channel patriotism, Holocaust remembrance was not supported with the same degree of sentiment as it alone could not harbor a supranational Yugoslav identity, despite the “neutralization of the national” tactic (Ristovi´c 2013, p. 140) used in the slogan “victims of fascist terror,” which was a means of attributing universal characteristics to the tragic deaths of Jews, Roma, and members of other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. Except for the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, no single other federal-level museum was dedicated to Ustashe, Chetnik, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian crimes.29 These crimes were only spoken of within larger museum institutions. Even if they were granted an independent museum display, this was always smaller, e.g., in a memorial house. One such example is the Memorial House of the Victims of Ustashe Terror in Glina.30 Sites of mass execution were subordinated to the role of mediating Yugoslav patriotism, yet the specific act of remembering the Holocaust did not inherently possess the kinds of sentiment suited to maintaining a supranational Yugoslav identity. Despite this, not all sites of mass execution included a museum exhibition. For instance, the execution of civilians in October 1941 in the Podrinje district (approximately 2385 persons, of

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whom 1379 were from the village of Draginac) (Vili´c 2013) was officially marked in 1961 with a monument and mounds in the place where the mass graves had been. However, it lacked an exhibition space. Indeed, Podrinje and Jadar were liberated by the Chetniks at the beginning of September 1941. Collaboration between the Chetniks and Partisans at the beginning of the war is a topic that was omitted in the official museological narrative of the history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.

Conclusion The Law on Collecting Books and Other Cultural-Scientific and Art Objects was enforced at the very end of the war, by mid-1945. Under the supervision of the federal government’s Ministry of Education, republic institutes were established that served the same purpose. The first museum law was passed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1947. The same law was passed in Serbia in 1951, and in Croatia in 1960. After the legal framework had been set, there was a need to train qualified personnel in relevant museological theory, which fell under the umbrella Marxist– Leninist museology at that time in Eastern Europe. With this aim in mind, the following specialized museum journals were established: Museums (1948), Museum Workers’ and Conservators’ News (1952), Museology (1953), Informatica Museologica (1970), etc. According to its founding documents (1947), the Fighters’ Association was supposed to coordinate the gathering materials on the People’s Revolution with the support of the Military Historical Institute and the historical departments of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (hereinafter: KPJ). Based on a system of competition and reward, the widest possible cross section of society was mobilized for this task. The politics of collecting Second World War objects reflected the KPJ’s aspirations to legitimize the postwar state system. The questionnaire produced by the Military Museum suggested that the collection of objects be classified into those representing the Partisan struggle and those representing the occupying forces and opponent formations during the civil war. Besides objects testifying to the KPJ-led resistance, other objects were also collected that testified to the treatment of the wounded and popular support for the Partisans. This was not the case with the group of objects defined as those of “domestic traitors,” which had been collected primarily to serve as proof of the crimes committed against civilians.

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From 1952 to 1963 the Committee for Maintaining and Marking Historical Sites of the People’s Revolution—a unit of the veteran associations financed by the Federal Executive Council—determined which historical places were of general Yugoslav importance for the memorialization of the Second World War. The genealogy of Second World War musealization shows that places of revolution, i.e., places where the KPJ held its sessions during the war, were top priority. The next step in the hierarchization of the memorial landscape related to places where crucial battles for the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia occurred. In the Yugoslav museumscape, places where civilians were killed, alongside Holocaust locations, came next, and were proportionally the fewest in comparison with the first two thematic groups of museums. Although the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, dedicated to the general history of the Jews in Yugoslavia, was founded merely three years after the war (1948), and even though by 1952 five monuments to Jewish victims of fascism were built in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Novi Sad, and Ðakovo, Holocaust musealization was never consistently implemented. The only independent memorial museum located on the site of a concentration camp was the one at Jasenovac. However, this was not a typical Holocaust site because besides marking the killing of Jews, it also marked the mass killing of Serbs in the NDH. Museums at concentration camp sites in Niš and Banjica (in Belgrade), were (and remain) annexes of city museums. Topics related to the German reprisals due to resistance by the (Chetnik) Yugoslav Army of the Fatherland, or by the Chetnik forces in collaboration with the Partisans (at the very beginning of the war in 1941) lay outside the scope of musealization. The NOB museums, by definition, promoted the leading role of the KPJ in liberating the country from occupying forces, as well as the “brotherhood and unity” narrative, which is why the collaboration between the Partisans and Chetniks at the very beginning of the war was barely mentioned in the official narratives that created the cultural pattern of remembering in Yugoslavia.

Notes 1. The People’s Liberation Struggle or the People’s Liberation War was the name for the armed struggle of the Yugoslav people led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia against occupying forces during the Second World War (1941–1945).

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2. The oath reads: (“I give my Pioneer’s word of honor, that I shall study and work diligently, respect my parents and seniors, and be a loyal and honest comrade; that I shall love our homeland, the self-managed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia…”). For more on the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia and the changes to the Partisan oath, see Duda (2015). 3. Self-management entered museums via the system of advisory boards. These were organizational bodies that consisted of up to nine members of various professional backgrounds from the teaching profession, whose members were the most numerous. They also included company directors, farmers, pensioners, etc. Socialist self-management was introduced in all museums. See Mano Zisi (1962, pp. 26–27). Via the mandates and the inclusion of the widest range of citizens in museum volunteer work, that is, by introducing the museum system of functioning to different organizations and individuals, and through an open call to them to participate in developing that system, the democratization and decentralization of culture was achieved to a certain degree. This new system was based on handing down the decision-making responsibility regarding key matters of cultural politics from the state to the self-managed communities of interests in culture. See Krivošejev (2011, p. 304). 4. For instance, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the National Museum in Belgrade (from 1936) merged with the private contemporary art collection of Prince Pavle Karad-ord-evi´c (Museum of Prince Pavle). See Mano Zisi (1962, p. 16). 5. For more on the creation of museums as “people’s institutions” after the Second World War, contrary to a view of museums as elite institutions in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, see Andrejevi´c-Kun (1948, p. 2). See also Pani´c-Surep (1948, pp. 5–10). For more on the roles of the museum worker in socialism, see Ðuri´c (1949, pp. 3–8). A historical overview of the issues of Muzeji, the first specialized journal in Yugoslavia, shows that the articles on desirable political agitation reform to be undertaken by institutions to further the progress of socialist culture were all in the first half of the journal, and there were fewer of them compared with the number of articles that did not strictly thematize the work of the museums in line with the development of socialist society. 6. The building of “museums for the broadest masses” was a widespread concept in Eastern Europe, based on the premises of the Soviet school of museology. These premises were printed in Moscow in 1955 (Osnovy sovetskogo muzeevedenija) and were soon translated and used in the socialist part of Europe as a handbook for museum work, as well as a source for creating museum theory. See Hazvanie (1955). 7. For more about the museum laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Socialist Yugoslavia, see Cogo (2016).

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8. In Zagreb, Vijesti Društva muzejsko-konzervatorskih radnika NRH (News of Museum Professionals and Conservators of People’s Republic of Croatia) was published for the first time in 1952, followed by the specialized and scientific journal Muzeologija (Museology) in 1953 and Informatica Museologica (1970), etc. 9. A zbornik (edited collection) in this context is a record of the scientific papers published annually by a particular museum. For example: Zbornik Krajiških Muzeja (Proceedings of the Krajina Museums), Zbornik Vojnog Muzeja (Proceedings of the Military Museum), Zbornik Istorijskog Muzeja Srbije (Proceedings of the Historical Museum of Serbia), Zbornik Muzeja Revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine (Proceedings of the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina). 10. All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated. 11. See 1976. Jugoslavenski nacionalni komitet ICOM-a: Pravilnik. Informatica Museologica 7(5): 4–58. https://hrcak.srce.hr/146468 [Accessed December 4, 2017]. 12. See 1974. Statut Saveza muzejskih društava Jugoslavije. Informatica Museologica 5(22): 35. https://hrcak.srce.hr/146849. Accessed 12 April 2020. 13. SUBNOR was formed on June 29–30, 1961 by merging SBNOR with the Association of War Invalids of Yugoslavia and the Association of Reserve Officers and Non-coms. 14. Aleksandar Rankovi´c was the director of the committee, Velimir Stojni´c was secretary, and the members included Ðuro Pucar, Rodoljub ˇ Colakovi´ c, Osman Karabegovi´c, Spasenij Babovi´c, Otmar Kreaˇci´c, Slobodan Penezi´c, Voja Lekovi´c, Vladimir Dedijer, and Milijan Neoriˇci´c. 15. These bodies were also responsible for defining how memories were gathered from surviving war veterans; how they were documented as stenographic recordings, statements, and surveys; and how they were chronologically classified and published in memorial books and other kinds of chronicles of the Second World War. They were also engaged in writing Second World War-related handbooks for teachers, filming documentaries and other types of films dealing with NOB themes, publishing albums and photographs from the Second World War, and passing and applying legislative measures for the protection of NOB monuments and systematically collecting materials and issuing publications dealing with NOB topics. 16. For more on the activities of the Associations of Veterans People’s Liberation War in collecting materials related to the People’s Liberation Struggle see Lajbenšperger 2019: 347–356. 17. These questionnaires can be found at the Archive of Serbia, fond Ð 115, folder 63, under the title “Rezultati sakupljanja istorijskog materijala 1949 – SBNOR Zemaljski odbor O br. 1546.”.

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18. For more on the categorization and definition of memorial museums, see Otaševi´c (1977, pp. 7–11). 19. The original pamphlet “Generalna koncepcija mreže muzeja NOB-a i revolucije u Bosni i Hercegovini,” published in 1971 by the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina can be found at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. See 1971 Generalna koncepcija mreže muzeja NOB-a i revolucije u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Muzej Revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine, p. 20. 20. See 1971 Generalna koncepcija mreže muzeja NOB-a i revolucije u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Muzej Revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine, p. 23. 21. 1971 Generalna koncepcija mreže muzeja NOB-a i revolucije u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Muzej Revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine, p. 25. 22. Some examples of memorial houses as protected cultural monuments include: the House of the National Hero Milorad Bondžuli´c in Otanj, the House of the National Hero Vladimir Radovanovi´c in Godovik, which was supposed to have a display that was never made, the House of the National Hero Živan Mariˇci´c in Kruševica, the House of the National Hero Sima Pogaˇcarevi´c in Vranje, the House of NOB Importance in Turija. 23. Memorial exhibitions and houses on the territory of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia: the Memorial House in Robaje (Mionica), Sakar Memoˇ rial House (Mali Zvornik), Memorial House of Stevan Colovi´ c (Arilje), Memorial House at Stevanske livade (Sikole, Negotin), Slobodište Memorial House (Kruševac), The Partisan Base “Centar” (Vrbas), The House of the National Hero Milorad Bondžuli´c (Otanj, Požega), The House of the National Hero Miodrag Milovanovi´c (Lunovo selo, Užice), Memorial Exhibition “14 October” (Kraljevo), Memorial Exhibition “Former Fascist Prison ‘Hotel Milo’” (Beˇcej), Memorial Exhibition “Vodenica” (Kragujevac), Memorial House of the family Dudi´c (Klinci, Valjevo), Memorial House “Partizanski bivak” (Brusovo, Bor), Memorial Exhibition “Partisan Base” (Novi Sad), and Birth House “Ilija Nešin” (Kovilj). It is highly probably that in villages or hamlets, there were Second World War memorial houses, memorial exhibitions, or memorial rooms that have not been listed here. 24. Memorial Exhibitions and Houses on the territory of the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia: “Central Partisan Hospital” at Petrova Gora, Memorial House in Živaja (Kostajnica), Memorial House in Žirovac (Dvor), ˇ ca brdo, Šamarice), Memorial House “Brotherhood and Unity” (Cavi´ Memorial House at Plitvice, Memorial House of the Victims of Ustashe Terror (Glina), Memorial House “Seven Secretaries of SKOJ” (Sombor), Memorial House (Brestik), Memorial Exhibition “Battle on Batina” (Batina), Memorial Room in Ljeskovac (Dvor na Uni), Memorial House in Žirovica, Memorial Room “21st Slavonija Brigade” (Vo´cin), Memorial House “Virovitiˇcka’ Brigade”) Vukosavljevica), Partisan Encampment

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and Hospital (Bijeli Potoci, Kamensko), Memorial House “6th Proletarian Division Nikola Tesla” (Mukinja, Plitvice), Memorial House “First Women’s Youth Troop” (Trnovac, Titova Korenica), The “NOB on the Vodoteˇca and Škali´c Territory” (Vodoteˇca), Memorial House “Brotherhood and Unity” and the “Uprising in the Karlovac District” (Debela Kosa), Memorial House “Third ZAVNOH Session” (Topusko), Memorial House “Ribar Family” (Vukmani´c), Memorial House “Bolman Battle and Domicile Room of the Pötefi Battalion” (Bolman), Memorial Exhiˇ bition “‘Krndijska’ Partisan Group” (Caglin), Memorial Exhibition “Partisan Schooling in Ðakovaˇcka Brezica” (Ðakovaˇcka Brezica), Memorial exhibition of a reconstructed Partisan cabin – “NOB Development in the Western Županija Sector” (Gajni Vor), Memorial House “Partisan School” (Kamenski Vuˇcjak), Memorial House “Merolino NOB in the Vinkovac Area” (Vinkovac), The Domicile Room of the “Papuˇckokrndijski Department” (Našice), Memorial House “Partisan Hospital Encampment” (Turki), Memorial House “Banija Proletarian Company” (Brestik), Memorial House “First KPH District Conference, Banija and KPH Kotar Conference Dvor” (Ljeskovac), Memorial House “Fighters of NOR” and “The People’s Movement and NOB in Odra” (Odra), Memorial Room “Požega Military Region” (Velika), Memorial Exhibition “Concentration Camp in Stara Gradiška” (Stara Gradiška), Memorial Exhibition “Memorial Building on Zveˇcevo: Power Station and Central Mechanical Workshop of the 4th Military District Corps” (Zveˇcevo), Memorial House “First Party Advisory for Istria” (Brgudac), Memorial Exhibition “Bribir in the Workers’ Movement in NOR and Post-War Socialist Construction” (Bribir), Memorial Region of the “‘Partizanska Drežnica:’ Memorial Ambulance” (Drežnica), Memorial House “‘Sloboda’ Illegal Party Printing-House” (Kosinj), Memorial House “3rd Brigade, 43rd Istria Division” (Labin), Museum Exhibition “Tito’s Cell” (Ogulin), Memorial House of “Unification and Freedom” (Pazin), Memorial Room “First SKOJ District Conference for Istria and First KPH District Conference for Istria” (Raˇcice), Memorial House “KPJ Founding District Conference for Sisak” (Žabno), Memorial House “CKKPJ Party School ‘Villa Irene’” (Makarska), Memorial House “NOP on the Island of Iž” (the island of Iž), Memorial House “First Naval Detachment” (Podgora), Memorial House “Vidovi´c Mill – Base 1” (Gornji Ku´can), Birth House of National Hero “Rudolf Kroflin” (Leniš´ce), Memorial House “Milenko Brkovi´c-Crni” (Brinjani), Birth House “Dr Božidar Adžije” (Drniš), Memorial Room “Giuseppine Martinuzzi” (Labin), Memorial House “National Heroine Anka Pad-en” (Crno), Memorial House “Stanko Radovanovi´c-Udarnik” (Duboka), Memorial House “Grga Jankes” (Bjelovar), Memorial House “Ðuro Ðakovi´c” (Brodski Varoš),

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Memorial House “Ivan Goran Kovaˇci´c” (Lukovdol), Memorial House “Rade Konˇcar” (Titova Korenica), Memorial House “Ivan Senjuk” (Slobodnica), Birth House of Josip Broz Tito (Kumrovec), Memorial House “Danica” (Koprivnica), Memorial House “Josip Broz Tito” (Veliko Trojstvo), Memorial House “Filip Kljaji´c-Fi´ca” (Tremušnjak), Memorial Room “Ðuro Salaj” (Valpovo), Birth House of the National Hero Vladimir Gortan and the “National and Revolutionary Road in Istria” (Beram), Birth House of Joakim Rakovac (Rakovci). It is highly probably that in villages or hamlets, there were Second World War memorial houses, memorial exhibitions, or memorial rooms that have not been listed here. 25. Memorial exhibitions and houses on the territory of the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Memorial Exhibition “Husinjani in the Revolution” (Husino), Memorial Exhibition “Concentration Camp for Communists” (Bile´ca), Memorial Exhibition “First Liberation of Bugojno” (Bugojno), Memorial Exhibition “Second Proletarian Brigade” ˇ (Cajniˇ ce), Memorial Exhibition “Grmeˇc Hospital Centre” (Grmeˇc), Memorial Exhibition “Sanica’s First Youth Agricultural Brigade” (Gornja Sanica), Memorial Exhibition “Congress of Partisan Doctors and Hospital Centre” (Bosanski Petrovac), Memorial Exhibition “First Congress of the Yugoslav Youth Antifascists” (Biha´c), Memorial Exhibition “Founding Conference of the People’s Liberation Front BiH” (Sanski Most), Memorial House of “Biraˇc in NOB” (Šekovi´ci), Memorial Exhibition “Road to Victory” (Bosanska Gradiška), Memorial Exhibition “Luˇcci Palanka in NOR” (Luˇcci Palanka), Memorial Exhibition “Progressive Youth Movement 1919–1945” (Glamoˇc), Memorial Exhibition “6th Eastern Bosnian NOU Brigade” (Šekovi´ci), Memorial Exhibition “Testimonies of the Vraca Fight” (Sarajevo), Memorial House “Headquarters of Majevica’s First NOP Detachment” (Vukosavci), Memorial House “Oslobod-enje” (Donja Trnava), Memorial House “Provincial Advisory of KPJ for BiH January 7 and 8, 1942” (Ivanˇci´ci), Memorial House “First District Party Conference for Bosanksa Krajina” (Skender Vakuf), Memorial House “First NOU Brigade of Bosanska Krajina” (Lamovita), Memorial House “District Convention of the People’s Liberation Board of Herzegovina” (Berkovi´ci), Memorial House “Borba” Printing-House, Drini´c, Memorial House “First Conference of the Women of Yugoslavia Antifascist Front” (Bosanski Petrovac), Memorial House “Second ZAVNOBiH Session” (Sanski Most), Memorial House “Federal Commissioner’s Commissariat for Western Herzegovina with a Review of NOP in West Herzegovina” (Ljubiško), Memorial House “Mitar Trifunovi´c-Uˇco” (Bosanski Šamac), Memorial House “Džemal Bijedi´c” (Mostar), Memorial House “Nurije Pozderac” (Cazin), Memorial House “Vaso Pelagi´c” (Pelagi´cevo), Memorial House “Mi´co Sokolovi´c” (Rogatica), Memorial House “Mladen

2

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

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ˇ Stojanovi´c” (Prijedor), Memorial House “Ivan Krndelj” (Citluk), Memorial House “Mira Popara” (Fatnica), Memorial House “Muštrovi´c Family” (Mostar). See the official website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site: https://www.juspjasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6711 [Accessed May 7, 2022]. Exhibition label quote. The On Revolution Roads—Memorial Tourism in Yugoslavia exhibition held at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, opened on November 24, 2015. Available online: https://inappr opriatemonuments.org/hr/2015/11/04/izlozba-putevima-revolucijememorijalni-turizam-u-jugoslaviji/ [Accessed July 7, 2017]. Ibid. I am grateful to Nenad Lajbenšperger for consultation on this issue. The Memorial House in Glina opened in 1969. It displayed a list of all the 1,564 Serbs from Glina, and the surrounding area, who were killed by the Ustashe in the spring and summer of 1941.

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Cogo, Ikbal. 2016. Muzejsko zakonodastvo u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1945. do 2012. Zenica: Muzej grada Zenica. Duda, Igor. 2015. Danas kada postajem pionir: Djetinjstvo i ideologija jugoslavenskoga socijalizma. Zagreb: Srednja Evropa. Ðuri´c, Vojislav. 1949. Uloga muzeja i muzejskih radnika u našoj zemlji. Muzeji 2: 3–8. Geiger, Vladimir. 2011. Ljudski gubici Hrvatske u Drugom svjetskom ratu koje su prouzroˇcili “okupatori i njihovi pomagaˇci”. Brojidbeni pokazatelji ˇ (procjene, izraˇcuni, popisi). Casopis za suvremenu povijest 43 (3): 699–749. https://hrcak.srce.hr/76758. Accessed 4 May 2022. Goskul’tprosvetizdat. 1955. Osnovy sovetskogo muzeevedenija. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo kul’turno-prosvetitel’noj literatury. Höpken, Wolfgang. 1999. Vergangenheitspolitik im sozialistischen Vielvölkerstaat: Jugoslawien 1944 bis 1991. In Umkämpfte Vergangenheit: Geschichtsbilder, Erinnerung und Vergangenheitspolitik im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Petra Bock and Edgar Wolfrum, 210–243. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Horvatinˇci´c, Sanja. 2017. Spomenici iz razdoblja socijalizma u Hrvatskoj— prijedlog tipologije. PhD dissertation, Sveuˇcilište u Zadru. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2016. Museum (Re)public. Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta LXIV: 105–119. https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI1601105J. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2017. Jugoslavizacija muzejskog polja. Zbornik radova Historijskog Muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine 12: 11–19. Sarajevo: Historijski Muzej Bosne i Hercegovine. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2021. The Post-Yugoslav Kaleidoscope: Curatorial Tactics in the (Ethno) Nationalization of Second World War Memorial Museums in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia: Synchronous Pasts, ed. Gruia B˘adescu, Britt Baillie, and Francesco Mazzucchelli, 295–322. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Jakir, Aleksandar. 2020. Spomenici su prošlost i budu´cnost. Politiˇcki i administrativni mehanizmi financiranja spomenika za vrijeme socijalistiˇcke Jugoslavije. ˇ Casopis za suvremenu povijest 51 (1): 151–182. https://doi.org/10.22586/ csp.v51i1.8293. Jugoslavenski nacionalni komitet ICOM-a. 1976. Pravilnik. Informatica museologica 7 (5): 4–58. https://hrcak.srce.hr/146468. Accessed 4 December 2017. Karge, Heike. 2012. Sajmište, Jasenovac, and the Social Frames of Remembering and Forgetting. Filozofija i Društvo 23 (4): 106–118. https://doi.org/10. 2298/FID1204106K. Karge, Heike. 2014. Se´canje u kamenu—okamenjeno se´canje, trans. Aleksandra Kosti´c. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek.

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Kastratovi´c Risti´c, Veselinka. 2008. Nastajanje i nestajanje jednog muzeja. In Muzeji kao mesta pomirenja, eds. Slad-ana Bojkovi´c and Ana Stoli´c, 326–340. Belgrade: Istorijski muzej Srbije. Kerenji, Emil. 2008. Jewish citizens of socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish identity in a socialist state, 1944–1974. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan. Krivošejev, Vladimir. 2011. Muzejska politika u Srbiji: Nastajanje, kriza i novi poˇcetak. Kultura, cˇasopis za teoriju i sociologiju kulture i kulturnu politiku 130: 291–317. Belgrade: Zavod za prouˇcavanje kulturnog razvitka. https:// doi.org/10.5937/kultura1130291K. ˇ Kumovi´c, Mladenko. 2004. Muzeološko obrazovanje u Finskoj, Ceškoj Republici i Srbiji i Crnoj Gori. Novi Sad: Muzej Vojvodine. Lajbenšperger, Nenad. 2019. Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u politici jugoslovenske države (1945–1980). PhD dissertation, Univerzitet u Beogradu. Lozi´c, Vanja. 2015. (Re)Shaping History in Bosnian and Herzegovinian Museums Culture. Unbound 7: 307–329. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu. 2000.1525.1572307. Maliˇci´c, Zlatko. 1984. Zbirke novije istorije u muzejima i zbirkama u Bosni i Hercegovini. Master’s thesis, Sveuˇcilište u Zagrebu. Mano Zisi, Ðorde. 1962. Muzeji i zbirke u Jugoslaviji. In Muzeji Jugoslavije, eds. Draga Garašanin, Ðord-e Mano Zisi and Rajko Nikoli´c, 9–30. Belgrade: Savez muzejskih društava Jugoslavije. Manojlovi´c-Pintar, Olga. 2008. Uprostoravanje ideologije: Spomenici Drugog svetskog rata i kreiranje kolektivnih identiteta. Dijalog povjesniˇcara/istoriˇcara 10 (1): 287–307. Zagreb: Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung. https://doi.org/10. 5937/a-u0-24074. Meral, Ziya. 2012. A Duty to Remember? Politics and Morality of Remembering Past Atrocities. International Political Anthropology 5 (1): 29–50. Jasenovac Memorial Site. Jasenovac: Spomen-podruˇcje Jasenovac. Muzej revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine. 1971. Generalna koncepcija mreže muzeja NOB-a i revolucije u Bosni i Hercegovini. Arhiv Historijskog Muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine (Archive of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Nikoli´c, Rajko 1962. Muzeji Jugoslavije. Belgrade: Savez muzejskih društava Jugoslavije. Otaševi´c, Dušan. 1986. Kritiˇcka analiza memorijalnih institucija. Informatica museologica 17 (1–4): 17–21. https://hrcak.srce.hr/145459. Accessed 12 June 2019. Otaševi´c, Dušan. 1977. Muzeološki prikaz ZAVNOBiH-a i izgradnje bosanskohercegovaˇcke državnosti. Unpublished Master thesis, Sveuˇcilište u Zagrebu. Petranovi´c, Branko and Momˇcilo Zeˇcevi´c. 1988. Jugoslavija 1918–1988: Tematska zbirka dokumenata. Belgrade: Izdavaˇcka radna organizacija “Rad”.

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Radovanovi´c, Vojislava. 2010. The Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade. An Exhibition Catalogue. Belgrade: The Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia. https://www.jevrejskadigitalnabiblioteka.rs/bitstream/handle/123 456789/1257/JevrejskiIstorijskiMuzejUBeogradu.pdf. Accessed 11 March 2020. Ristovi´c, Milan. 2013. Kome pripada istorija Jugoslavije? Godišnjak Za Društvenu Istoriju 20 (1): 133–143. SBNOR Zemaljski odbor O br. 1546. 1949. Rezultati sakupljanja istorijskog materijala. 18 June. Arhiv Srbije (Archive of Serbia), fond Ð 115, folder 63. Statut Saveza muzejskih društava Jugoslavije. 1973. Informatica Museologica 5(22): 35. https://hrcak.srce.hr/146849. Accessed 12 April 2020. Stojanovi´c, Dubravka. 2013. Se´canje protiv istorije: Udžbenici kao glavni problem. Beogradski istorijski glasnik 4: 185–204. http://147.91.75.9/man age/shares/BIG/BIG_04_2013.pdf. Accessed 23 April 2021. Šulc, Branka. 1984. Adresar muzeja i galerija Jugoslavije. Informatica museologica 15 (1–3): 68–80. https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/214779. Accessed 14 April 2022. Sundhaussen, Holm. 2004. Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten: Konstruktion, Dekonstruktion und Neukonstruktion von “Erinnerungen” und Mythen. In Mythen der Nationen: 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen, ed. Monika Flacke, 373–426. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Sundhaussen, Holm. 2014. Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943–2011: Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des Gewöhnlichen. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag Wien. Vasiljevi´c, Marija. 2012. Potencijal „biografskih“ pristupa muzealijama ka razumevanju nasled-a i njegovog zaboravljanja. Studija zaboravljanja na primeru Muzeja ilegalnih partijskih štamparija. Master’s thesis, Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu. Videkani´c, Bojana. 2020. Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Vili´c, Goran. 2013. Nemaˇcki zloˇcini u Jadru 1941. godine. Habilitation work, Narodni muzej Beograd/Komisija za sticanje struˇcnih zvanja. Vuˇceti´c, Radina. 2018. Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. Budapest: Central European University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The People’s Liberation Struggle Museum

Abstract This chapter reveals how the conceptualizing of Second World War heritage and Yugoslavia’s socialist identity were inextricably intertwined and bound. It considers the neologism “museums of recent history,” which was used by Yugoslav museologists to signify the context in which the People’s Liberation Struggle Museums and the Museum of the Revolution were created. The focus is on the dominant museographic matrixes in the musealization of the Second World War. These include the Soviet model in the 1950s, “socialist modernism” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the convergence between these methodological principles and the appearance of the “forensic aesthetic” in the late 1980s. Yugoslav museologists’ contribution to the development of museology as an academic discipline during the Cold War is also considered.

Introduction Just “having a museum” was itself already a performative utterance of having an identity. (Macdonald 2003, p. 3)

The legal patterns that regulated museum practices related to how and to what extent the historical sources collected led to the construction © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_3

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of two types of “museums of recent history” (Otaševi´c and Kojovi´c 1987) in Yugoslavia. These were the museums of the revolution and the People’s Liberation Struggle museums (Muzeji Narodnooslobodilaˇcke borbe, hereinafter: NOB museums). Unlike NOB museums, which were conceived as institutions focused on the Second World War period, the museums of the revolution dealt with a broader period: (1) the history of the workers’ movement (1878–1941); (2) the People’s Liberation Struggle (1941–1945); and (3) the development of the socialist selfmanagement system (the period after 1950) (Jagdhuhn 2017a, p. 15). Neither of the thematic exhibition units—the war (1941–1945) or the revolution (from the nineteenth century to the moment of musealization)—were presented as completed historical periods. An emphasis was instead placed on the intertwining of historical facts with contemporary social and political factors (Babi´c and Durbeši´c 1975). The museums of the revolution sought to musealize the specific historical circumstances that made the Yugoslav revolution unique (The Partisan Movement was ethnically and to a certain extent politically heterogenous), but even more the idea of revolution as a continuous process (Jagdhuhn 2016, p. 106). With few if any original objects in their permanent displays, these museums often had a conceptual nature (Kneževi´c 1986). Through an analysis of the nomenclature of museum materials exhibited in the Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities, located in Belgrade, Dušan Otaševi´c (1988, p. 129) concluded that the number of three-dimensional objects was extremely small—a mere six percent of all the exhibited pieces. Installations (photographic slides, art interventions, photographs, etc.) therefore dominated in the thematic plans for the museums of the revolution. These exhibitions’ driving force was political thought rather than the museum objects (Kastratovi´c Risti´c 2008, p. 326). They therefore had to coordinate how they gathered materials, so that collecting the past was also supported by collecting the present in order to strengthen the dialectical link between the past and the ongoing present moment. In so doing, this Soviet type of museum foregrounded the relationship between the museum and science (Stránský 1984, p. 9). The social role of the People’s Liberation Struggle was defined by the following elements: (1) the glorification of the Communist Party’s leading role; (2) the revival of patriotism; (3) the promotion of “brotherhood and unity”; (4) the communication of moral and ethical messages related to

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the revolution and People’s Liberation War; and (5) the historical contextualization of the military experiences of the People’s Liberation War ˇ 1972, p. 15). The museums sought to evoke these elements in an (Cejvan authentic manner, transforming “valleys into theatre stages” (Burghardt and Kirn 2011, pp. 98–132) to that end. Located in situ, they were replete with the ceremonial character of a site of memory. They were therefore called historical-memorial or just memorial museums, while the museums of the revolution remained strictly historical museums, tied to a particular territory (with one or more featuring in each republic and province,1 while at the federal level in Belgrade there was the Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities). These two types of recent-history museums shaped each other in turn. The NOB museums were often branches of the museums of the revolution. Many were created as outside projects complementing the museums of the revolution. For instance, the Sarajevo-based Museum of the Revolution helped complete the NOB-memorial-museum displays in Drvar and Foˇca.2 They were aided by curators employed in the museums of the revolution, who had more expertise as these museums had more time and resources available for academic research.3 This type of interdependence and the strong control that the museums of the revolution had over NOB museums attests to the centralized, controlled development of a museum network related to the Second World War. To fully understand the complex issue of the NOB museums in terms of “the agency of ideology” (Coffee 2006, pp. 435–448), it is important to include another ubiquitous type of museum in Yugoslavia—the homeland museum (zaviˇcajni muzej ). Very often, NOB-related collections in homeland museums were the forerunners of certain NOB memorial museums, exhibitions, or houses. In the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia there were two types of museums: those that had special materials, e.g., from a particular field of the natural or social sciences, and those that collected different materials whose work and functioning were not defined by a particular academic discipline and were thus questionable.4 Therefore, in 1949 the Yugoslav government’s Ministry of Science and Culture established a project to reorganize the existing museum types and establish new ones in Yugoslavia. The following points were considered and debated at a conference (on June 2, 1949, in Belgrade), and published later in a double issue of the journal Muzeji (Issue 3–4): the museum’s task and name, the museum materials, the themes and structure, the elementary principles of exhibition setup, the museum locations

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across the Yugoslav territory, the principle of differentiating between museum material and work organization.5 The conference’s conclusion was that as museums that interpret society through the prism of Marxist– Leninist science do not exist, the homeland museums’ role would be to resolve this issue. In a wider sense, these museums were intended to present the character of a particular area, its economy, and indicate the development of society there and its ideology.6 Their exhibitions included relief maps and the area’s geological structure, followed by the economic and political history of that area, which clearly outlined the development of class and class differences, so that the theme of the People’s Liberation Struggle—as the forms of protest and struggle in a particular area for its liberation— underlined the role of the workers’ movement and the meaning of the Communist Party for what was referred to as the People’s Revolution. Due to their regional focus, they were often called district museums (e.g., the Museum of Vojvodina or the Museum of the Croatian Littoral). Four basic themes underpinned the homeland museums: the area’s natural features, the area’s history, the People’s Liberation Struggle, and the act of building socialism. The collections linked to the People’s Liberation Struggle were the largest, and they often transformed into independent NOB museums. For instance, in April 1956 the People’s Committee of the Biha´c District founded the Homeland Museum in Drvar. Its task was to collect materials for the museum from the territory that the Drvar Council had covered, which would be presented at the opening of the Museum “25 May 1944.”7 However, the procedure for suggesting new museums, memorial rooms, and museum exhibitions was to submit a request to the Commission for Marking Places and Dates of the People’s Liberation War (Komisija za obeležavanje mesta i datuma iz Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata). Suggestions came primarily from local communities, which raced to position themselves on the map of NOB remembrance. As no professionals were available to run a complex museum in these locations and to take care of the collections, these smaller-scale museums were established by moving already-formed NOB collections from homeland museums or the museums of the revolution. As can be concluded, the establishment of NOB museums was intertwined historically with the development of the network of museums of the revolution and homeland museums in Yugoslavia. Pragmatically, these museums differentiated their fields of work and expertise, and there

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was a mutual exchange of objects, collections, and knowledge mechanisms (i.e., methodologies) that supported their founding principles. Several basic requirements needed to be met for an NOB museum to be established, namely: (1) there needed to be a scientific appraisal of the memorial phenomenon and of its political and overall cultural importance; (2) a museological concept for the institution had to be created; (3) there had to be curatorial research and the memorial phenomenon had to be documented; (4) the museum’s documentation of the topic had to be processed, safeguarded, and used; and (5) the forms of presentation and communication of the memorial phenomenon had to be defined (Otaševi´c 1988, pp. 154–179). Unlike the planned top-down establishment of NOB museums, after politicians’ and professionals’ careful deliberation, memorial houses and exhibitions were built on the initiative of local SUBNOR (the Federation of Veterans’ organizations from the People’s Liberation War) branches, community offices, or even smaller, informal groups of citizens. There were two reasons for this. On the one hand, there was a personal need to mark the deaths of family members in the war, and on the other hand, there was a political race to demonstrate Party loyalty by nurturing “NOB traditions,” as the Party described them. The difference between these two types of museum institutions lay in the complexity of their museological use. Besides exhibiting, NOB museums also conducted research, augmented collections, and created a firm network of educational and outreach programs for diverse types of visitors. In contrast, the memorial houses and exhibitions had a pedagogical nature. Also, these memorial institutions had no consistent definition. Consequently, and due to their random proliferation, no conclusive and comprehensive list of all memorial museums, houses, and exhibitions has ever been drawn up, despite several attempts.8 This issue is further complicated by the incompetence of the exhibition authors (Pandži´c 1986). The birth houses of national heroes were particularly lacking: some had permanent displays but oftentimes they were little more than buildings recognized as cultural property, with museum educators inadequately trained (Kanižaj 1987, p. 8). Besides all these issues, inconsistencies in terminology, a lack of clear, long-term financing, and the specialized development of memorial institutions, and federally uncoordinated changes made to museum laws at the republic and regional levels all left the Yugoslav memorial museums with an open, unfinished form in which the state reproduced its (self-) image of the past and therefore its vision of the future.

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Discourse: Role and Message The post-Second World War memorial museums, not only in Yugoslavia but within the wider postwar context, according to Paul Williams (2007, p. 8), revealed “an increasing desire to add both a moral framework to the narration of terrible historical events and more in-depth contextual explanations to commemorative acts.” Unlike the historical museums whose role was oriented primarily toward history education, the Yugoslav memorial museums had the substantial task of creating a space for the authentic experience of a “memorial phenomenon which is by rule an event, a person, process, intuition, etc., of specific political, cultural, social experience and interest” (Otaševi´c 1988, p. 51). According to Stránský (1994, p. 50), these institutions could combine an “in situ” and “in fondo” (“in the fund, in the artificial metaworld of the museum”9 ) memorial and museological approach by creating a spatial story about a certain historical event, period, process, or person, and by organizing commemoration events. When comparing Second World War monuments from the end of the 1940s with those from the 1970s, a gulf is visible between the aesthetics of socialist realism (a phase that lasted the shortest time in Yugoslavia, until the early 1950s), and the later dominant aesthetic code of socialist modernism or socialist aestheticism (Sretenovi´c 2016, p. 15). At the NOB museums, this shift in cultural politics implied a rebuttal of Soviet role models. Nevertheless, comparatively speaking, this was not so radical. A clear shift is visible in museum displays of the immediate postwar period and the early 1950s compared with those of the 1970s. The museum exhibitions, dedicated to various political meetings and built in the first years of Yugoslavia, were largely composed of “paper documentation”: archival documents and photographs exhibited in an authentic historical building (e.g., the museums of the First and Second AVNOJ Session, Museum “7 July,” etc.). By the 1970s, the museum exhibitions had become ambient installations that were enhanced with interventions composed of specially commissioned works of art, such as sculptures, paintings, and audio and video recordings (e.g., Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska,” Museum “Lipa Remembers,” etc.), or of a combination of paper installations and art installations (Museum “Srem Front,” Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca,” Museum “21 October,” Jasenovac Memorial Museum, etc.).

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The museum’s modernization was visible primarily in the curatorial methods used to create an atmosphere: technological innovations and the development of new methods of historical mediation were key. However, the methodology underpinning the exhibition concepts and displays, developed largely by historians from outside the NOB museums (e.g., by curators from the museums of the revolution or the Military Museum in Belgrade), had a vocabulary and display structure that was close to the concept of Communist bloc museums right up to the end of Yugoslavia. Even when during the 1960s and especially the 1970s, “the bureaucratic enlightenment model was substituted with the prestigious enlightenment cultural policy model, museums continued their development on the basis set by the Agitprop aperture”10 (Krivošejev 2011, p. 300). The rigidity of such museum displays reflects the authoritative mode of vertical communication present—the transmission of a one-dimensional museum message. In its attempts at historical storytelling, the “authoritative museum” inevitably drew on many quotations that had a strong ideological element, including the words of Josip Broz Tito. In summary, at the conceptual level the Yugoslav NOB museums closely followed the role models established by the Marxist–Leninist school of thought, while they were distinctive in their architectural and spatial innovations and in their artistic and technological nature. Reconstructing the differences in the public reception of the NOB museums and NOB monuments built during the same period is a demanding task. By analyzing societies’ “behaviors,” that is, the public reactions to monuments and cemeteries commemorating “fallen fighters” and “victims of fascist terror” during the 1950s and 1960s in Yugoslavia, Max Bergholz has written of examples of neglected places of remembrance (monuments overgrown in weeds) (Bergholz 2007, pp. 68–69), cases of the desecration of monuments and cemeteries, and the erection of monuments dedicated to anticommunist forces. Examples include plowing over Partisan graves while adorning Ustashe graves in Croatia, and the erection of a monument honoring Aleksij-Leko Marseni´c (a Chetnik commander) in the village of Brežani in Serbia, where a priest erected a memorial plaque with the inscription, “For the freedom and unification of the Serbian peoples who lay down their lives from 1941 to 1947”) (Bergholz 2007, pp. 72–73). It is practically impossible to conduct an empirical analysis of how museum exhibitions were received. Press clippings on museum and exhibition openings report exclusively positive reviews.11 There must have

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been a certain kind of “indifference” toward the museums because, as the museologist Ljiljana Gavrilovi´c (2009, p. 8) wrote, “Communism made them all the same – to such an extent that I knew what to expect.” However, it may well be argued that there were no similar subversions either in or around museums, unlike with the countermemory monuments. The reasons for this are straightforward: it is more complicated to build a museum than a monument on the initiative of a small group of people that defies the ruling “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980, p. 131) regarding the war. Equally, provoking a reaction from the regime in a regime-controlled institution, which the NOB museums were, was inconceivable. Nevertheless, development and change in the museums was slow and there were no radical changes made to such a process, at least none that would obstruct the primacy of socialist Yugoslavism. Indeed, the museums’ role and function came under heated debate and criticism at meetings of the Committee for Marking Historical Sites from the People’s Liberation War (Odbor za ured-ivanje i obeležavanje istorijskih mesta iz Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata) until its dissolution in 1963, and later at the Council for Nurturing the Tradition of the NOB (Savet za negovanje tradicija Narodnooslobodilaˇcke borbe), which was under the auspices of the Yugoslav Federal Committee of SUBNOR. This was also the case at meetings of museum professionals, which were published in specialist museum journals. Suggestions were made regarding the discovery of new, contemporary methods of bringing up and educating the youth based on “revolutionary traditions” and on organizing new forms of conveying history through festivals, film screenings, excursions, Partisan marches, seminars in historical places, etc. Criticisms made emphasized the lack of specialized professionals (most of the museum employees were educators), the lack of clear museum concepts, and the need to further develop museum concepts (Maliˇci´c 1984, p. 152; Otaševi´c 1988, pp. 195–196), the unplanned construction of memorial houses, the asynchrony between the museum laws and terminology used (Šola 1983, pp. 9–10), memorial exhibitions and the impossibility of making a final list of those registered (Kanižaj 1987, p. 6), and the need to assess the value of what has been built. In addition, criticisms were voiced regarding their financing, the deficiencies of self-management, and their accommodating the tastes of the wider masses. However, never—not even after the strengthening of the country’s federalization through the 1974 constitution—were efforts made suggesting historical ethnicization. The only museum—apart from

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the historical museums—that explicitly referred to an ethnic affiliation in its name was the Museum of Serbs in Croatia (1946–1963), which was intended to be a specialized institution for the history of Serbs in Croatia. Regardless of the government’s attempts to create a consistent politics of musealization through the activities of the Associations of Veterans, the criteria and motives used to establish the NOB museums were never uniform. Otaševi´c (1988, p. 50) stated that museums were legally established based on studious specialized preparation, but at the same time, in haste, without fundamental precursory work, mostly when celebrating different anniversaries, for different events, persons, etc., in order to formally mark what was intended for the given celebration.

A study by the Museum Documentation Center in 1988 regarding the state of the museums and other institutions that safeguard and present materials linked to the period of the workers’ movement, the People’s Liberation Struggle, and postwar socialist development, stated that the issue with institutions not being registered was due to the inadequate status of their memorial collections and institutions. The museums’ geographic dispersal and arrangement (i.e., the construction of museum institutions), their accumulation and categorization (of themes and of museum content communication), and their tensions and euphoria (forging the NOB narrative as an axis of identity along which a collective consciousness rises above ethnic politics), Yugoslav state-determined patterns of collective memory were continually corrected and revised. No matter how hard the Party tried to curb and systematize the construction and functioning of NOB museums, the abrupt and unplanned emergence of museums made the museum network a decentralized, irregular, and unfinished state project. Last, a clear language of the NOB museums was never honed. Indeed, their transitional character has remained a dominant trait of Yugoslavia’s rhizomatic memorial infrastructure, which has continually shifted its focus, especially regarding techniques for representing historical narratives.

Praxis: Image of the Artifact How did the collected objects mature into musealia? What procedures were historical sources subjected to when they entered the museum?

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What featured as Second World War heritage in museum exhibits during Yugoslav socialism? When historical sources entered the museum, they were overburdened by a thick network of new connotations that were attributed to them. These included connotations implicit in: (1) the criteria that needed to be fulfilled in selecting a certain object as museologically valuable (the collecting policy—guidelines and procedures); (2) a source’s entry into a collection (i.e., its meaning as constructed in relation to the other elements in the collection, most often according to the nature of the material or scientific discipline), which could be valorized by that discipline, and by related collection objects such as art, medals, photographs, etc.; (3) its final placement within a museum exhibition framework, again in relation to other proximate objects, i.e., its position in the architecturally and curatorially shaped interior of the overall exhibiting space; (4) and in the final instance, through the mutually shaped visitor–object relationship. The museum exhibition has a presence that follows and relates to the visitor’s receptive capacity. Thus, it is objectified through an interweaving, pouring, and permeation of individual remembering and collective memory, which any given museum object as cultural symbol manifests and embodies. It is precisely that possibility, the potential of “renewing” the past through museum objects as evidence filtered through the present, that defines the specific quality of the museum object—its museality.12 Building new types of museums in the Socialist Yugoslavia involved a new methodology of documenting the object in the museum. Indeed, “the number of museum working organizations dealing with the theme of recent history was over fifty percent of all museum institutions in Yugoslavia” (Ižakovi´c 1985, p. 144). It is important to remember that barely five or six years had passed since the end of the Second World War when the NOB museums produced their first documentation of that war through a close collaboration with surviving protagonists. This type of documentation drew on fieldwork (with witnesses) (Otaševi´c 1977, 1978, pp. 55–65), and it was further researched in museums by “applying the Marxist method in social sciences for the museological interpretation of reality” (Ižakovi´c 1985, p. 185). Historical documents were acquired and added to collections. In turn, these museum objects became “documents of the present” (Laszlo 1997, p. 63). In a final stage of musealization, these documents, through the “collection-creating activities of the curators” (Ižakovi´c 1985, p. 63) “matured” into exhibits.

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Most exhibits in the NOB museums were archivalia remodeled as museum objects. They consisted mainly of photocopies of documents, memoir manuscripts, declarations, prints, posters, documents from various hearings, orders, journals, leaflets, letters, military reports, and various legal acts (Otaševi´c 1977, 1978, p. 56). The documents were sorted by origin into those that related to the Yugoslav Communist Party and the Council of the Communist Youth of Yugoslavia, and those that related exclusively to the occupying forces and quislings. As concerns the variety of three-dimensional objects, the largest portion consisted of weapons, various personal objects belonging to fighters: clothes, footwear, dishes, various tools, and technical equipment used by Partisans in diversions, the stamps of People’s Liberation Councils, Partisan unit medical supplies, various cadastral maps, gestetners (a device similar to a photocopier) and other parts of printing machines, concentration camp prisoners’ handicrafts, etc. NOB museums also protected photographs sorted into the prewar period of the workers’ movement (strikes, May 1 celebrations, gatherings, prominent people, etc.) and the NOB period (photographs of both dead and living Partisans, and photographs of the terror linked to the occupying forces and the Chetniks and Ustashe). Most date from 1941 to 1945. Other objects in NOB museums included the occasional relief model, scale model, or map. These exhibits’ legitimacy was based on their documentary (primarily archival materials), illustrative (e.g., medical supplies), and sentimental (personal objects) value as testimony. Soviet museologists felt that it was necessary to break with perceptions of museum objects as curiosities, objects of antiquity, or objects of special value for a particular scientific discipline (for instance art history, archaeology, etc.). Their stance was that objects should be collected and arranged in museums to speak to humanity as a whole, and especially to the group of people who used those objects. In other words, their application of the principle of dialectical materialism in museums “meant that in contrast to the bourgeois museum of the past, its Soviet counterpart must treat natural history, social history, and the cultural sphere not as alienated and antagonistic to man, but as products of his conscious effort” (Zhilyaev 2017, p. 43). Based on the Marxist–Leninist museological school, NOB museums were spaces “in which not the ‘objects’ but the developmental laws of the dialectics are the new element of the exhibition work.”13 Thus, their primary goal was to communicate a certain historical process. Because

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of this approach, museum objects were robbed of their autonomy and field of effect. It did not matter whether an object was an original or a copy. However, what was important was how it communicated with as wide a range of social strata as possible, through how it linked to other objects in the museum exhibition within an “ideological montage” (Dobrenko 2008, p. 8). In line with this principle, many NOB museums were built as reconstructions of certain environments, as interiors in which certain periods or moments of historical importance occurred. Examples of this included the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session, the Museum complex “Military Counsel in Stolice,” the Memorial House “First State Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Session” etc.). The display methods employed relied primarily on a scenographic method that was used to sentimentally evoke memories of a historic moment (Fig. 3.1). The exhibition rooms’ design and atmosphere primarily conveyed the museum’s story—not the “real objects.” The second principle often applied to the thematic organization of materials was to foreground art installations when planning the museum space. The Museum “Lipa Remembers” is a good example in which the museum theme relates to the

Fig. 3.1 The Museum of the first AVNOJ session in Yugoslavia (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of the Una-Sana Canton. © Museum of the Una-Sana Canton)

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tragedy of the execution of almost the entire village in one day (on April 30, 1944) in a retaliatory move by the occupying forces. The villagers’ engagement along Partisan lines was presented through several installations that reconstructed the environment and replaced documentary photographic material (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). Those who developed the concept for the “Lipa Remembers” museum display (the curators from what was then the Museum of the Revolution in Rijeka), were fully aware of the impossibility of representing a tragedy of the scope that occurred in Lipa. They had learned their lessons from the documentary approach employed in the Jasenovac Memorial Museum where visitors fainted due to explicit images of suffering (the most brutal footage was conveyed in films such as The Gospel of Evil (Evand-elje zla), directed by Gojko Kastratovi´c, and Jasenovac 1945, directed by Bogdan Žiži´c). The curators thus used a pictorial approach to solve the problem of how they present the tragedy. One wall displayed rows of German helmets that represented the occupational military power, while the other

Fig. 3.2 Wall installation—A photo wallpaper print of children at play (Museum “Lipa Remembers”) (Reproduced with permission of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka. Photo © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka)

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Fig. 3.3 Wall installation—rows of German helmets (Museum “Lipa Remembers”) (Reproduced with permission of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka. Photo © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka)

displayed a photo wallpaper print of children at play as a symbol of the fragility and innocence of the victims and of the renewal of life. After the war, survivors returned to the village and the museum was built thanks to their efforts and for the sake of their children, to preserve the memory of 269 civilians that were killed in 1944. Another conceptual dimension that added to the power of this minimalist approach to transmitting memory through art was the fact that the Museum “Lipa remembers” was part of a two-story building in Yugoslavia, with a kindergarten and childcare facilities on the ground floor, and an exhibition with no writing on the first floor (Jagdhuhn 2021, p. 299). The role of the teacher and curator was entrusted to one person, Danica Maljevi´c, a history and geography teacher. A similar curatorial approach was employed in the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska,” which was a museum with almost no threedimensional objects. The entire exhibition consisted of painted walls in a building architecturally planned as a memorial museum. It sought to

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convey the dramatic event that had occurred in the wilderness at the tripoint between Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Montenegro (Fig. 3.4). The curators thus overcame the disciplinary boundaries between art(works) and “traditional” museum objects. In other words, historical communication was no longer limited to an interpretation as privileged work that could be expressed solely through an authentic historical document. By avoiding disturbing photo and video images of suffering, the aim was to move away from a closer identification with the deceased individuals, and thus ultimately with the victim(s). The museum displays used artwork to communicate historical events and awaken patriotic emotions among visitors. These emotions were directed toward the state that had been born in and through the war. These efforts therefore also honored the victims who had lost their life for that struggle. In summary, the NOB museums primarily used paper documentation, including copies and replicas, as media for creating a museum atmosphere with the potential to evoke a historic moment. Nevertheless, most museums treated their exhibits as “display elements” that relied on a “puzzle technique,” wherein pieces were arranged to compose a museum

Fig. 3.4 The Memorial house “Battle on Sutjeska” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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display, which consisted of an architectural shell, i.e., a kind of wall installation that framed thematic (or chronological) exhibition sections (this usually consisted of paneling that covered the walls and showcases). One trait of this kind of museum display was that different quotations, slogans, mottos etc., were valued as much as the exhibits (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6). In most cases, Josip Broz Tito was quoted, as were certain representatives of the Supreme Headquarters on occasion, while sometimes the quotes were ideological slogans. The immaterial heritage placed in the museum therefore retained its performative quality. A typical example of this form of curatorial imagining of how objects were arranged was the Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca.” The photographs in Fig. 3.5 are an illustration of the museum exhibition on the Battle on Kadinjaˇca. Its display combined three-dimensional objects (weapons and tools made by artisans who were part of the Workers’ Battalion of the Užice People’s Liberation Movement), photographs and archival materials, citations, maps, and works of art. All exhibits were arranged on a brown wooden construction that covered all the wall surfaces. In so doing they both displayed and staged the items as documentary testimonies and museum

Fig. 3.5 The panel dedicated to the Worker’s Battalion. The Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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Fig. 3.6 An item from the permanent exhibition at the Museum “Srem Front” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

exhibits simultaneously, imbuing them with a theatrical quality. The same concept is present in the permanent displays of other museums such as the Museum “Srem Front,” the Museum “Foˇca’s period of NOB,” the Museum “7 July,” etc. The above categorization of museum materials should be further amended by introducing one more factor. Namely, “hidden” under the category of document and three-dimensional object, there was a complete range of types of museum materials used to animate the state’s symbolic

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vocabulary, including flags, slogans, military and political emblems, etc. These insignia are akin to what the historian Eric Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) referred to as “invented symbols.” This is because “the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, p. 13). This iconography, invented to create a Yugoslav state image and elaborated by the (authoritative) museum medium, was supposed to awaken in the observer a sense of common identity, belonging, and pride. This type of exhibit does history rather than representing history itself. In other words, it holds the performative power of constituting reality, and the simultaneous production of the visitor and collective, combined with its own frame of reference through the subject–object interaction, was the driving force behind Yugoslav museology. To reference John L. Austin’s (1955/1962) famous theory of the performative, the notion of the museum object’s performativity should be understood through a series of political, social, and museological conditions in which the object is objectified—i.e., through which it is chosen to perform a certain role as part of an exhibition’s plan. Finally, this should also be understood through the conventions within which it works—the moment of visitor recognition in which heritage is done. In following how heritage functions as a present-centered process, i.e., as a “verb” (Harvey 2001, p. 8) that identifies and does identity, one possible conclusion is that heritage can only be located partially in the chosen object itself, and that its “beginning” and “end” are primarily mental images (through the abovementioned operations, these images are transmitted from the commissioning body to the user), that is, discourse itself. Casey (2003, p. 3) named this rhizomatic image of the museum object “the screen,” referring to Lacan’s (1978) concept of the gaze, which she defines as a “collection of signs and signifiers given by social custom that represent the object.” Consequently, the “virtual” dimension of the museum object makes the museum exhibit an unstable knowledge construct (Waidacher 1998, pp. 83–84) whose message depends on the dynamics of interpreting the past from the present “as future past” (Brock 2001, pp. 25–31) moment. The possibility of inscribing the observerinduced “look” directly into the “body of the museum object”14 makes that museum object a powerful tool in constructing and enacting identity.

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Theory: Neither East nor West The museum should provide its visitors with a faithful picture of the conditions in which the nascent federation of Yugoslav peoples appeared, but more than that, the museum should embody a place in which our visitors, especially young people, could breathe in Yugoslav patriotism. (Bešlagi´c 1958, p. 76) ˇ Radoljub Colakovi´ c at the opening of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session.

Collective identity, just like heritage, does not exist of its own accord, “rather, it exists as a range of competing discourses that have significant and powerful cultural and political consequences and uses” (Waterton and Smith 2009, p. 12). The open process of its constitution occurs, among other places, in museums where a sense of belonging can be awakened. The function of memorial museums commemorating the People’s Liberation Struggle was to inspire Yugoslav patriotism in the new generations. In other words, the NOB museums’ intended function was to facilitate becoming a Yugoslav (Jagdhuhn 2017b). The act of “inhaling” identity in the museum involves performing heritage as “something that is done rather than something which is curated” (Smith 2015, p. 260). The chain reaction observed from a visitor-centered perspective would imply museality—sociocultural values that museum exhibits symbolize. Here, the objects function as identity “exhalation.” The prominent Yugoslav museologist Ivo Maroevi´c (1986, pp. 183–188) warned that identity is always a constituent of museality. However, the concept of museality is impossible to fathom unless the interest of the wider community in collecting and nurturing heritage is considered. This is an activity that is, historically speaking, inextricably bound to the construction of a national and (at that time) supranational identity. The idea of heritage as a performance capable of manifesting identity in Yugoslavia was developed on the level of theory under the influence of museological debates from both the East and the West, but primarily via Czechoslovak museology departments. However, in practice, the curatorial work of directing rituals, that is, mass group visits, was strongly influenced by the tenets of Soviet museology. Maroevi´c (1995, p. 30) understood the exhibition “as an event that transforms reality, as well as being the place where the new reality is constituted and where new knowledge about the past is born in the clash of the past and present time.”

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This is, although he never explained it in this way, the definition of the performative power of the museum space in creating a museum reality in which heritage—simultaneously shown and staged—plays out. Even though Maroevi´c did not use the term performativity, he understood the museum temporally, limited by its duration, and impossible to document completely, that is, to store within the archive, library, etc. He sought to offer a more plastic explanation of his own approach for comparison, and he stated that a museum exhibition is like a theater play in which the actors are museum objects that speak a special language. This has to be comprehended by the observer, so that the “play is a success” (Maroevi´c 2003, p. 15). It is tempting to draw a parallel between Maroevi´c’s understanding of the exhibition as performance and how the theater scholar FischerLichte (2008) defined the medium of performance as a “transformative power” that blurs the boundaries between the scene and the viewer. Just as artists in the 1970s used the medium of performance as a possibility to blur the lines between art (as system), the artist, and the work of art and audiences, a probable explanation may be that many theorists of museums in Central Eastern Europe thought along the same lines, seeing the museums that sprang up as supporting the establishment of socialist culture. They were therefore expected to part with the, then ongoing, (Western) European traditions of collecting, documenting, exhibiting, and communicating heritage. The tenets were set by Soviet museology,15 and they included aesthetic principles subordinated to the function of museum objects, the application of dialectical historical materialism in historical interpretations, and the explanation of historical processes through museum objects (Chlenova 2017, p. 2). These all led to a shift in focus among curators in Yugoslavia. The influences on Yugoslavia’s museography16 were geared toward a fundamental engagement with questions of defining how to create choices of museum objects that helped transmit the dialecticalmaterialist approach, combining exhibits so that the ideological and theoretical illumination of the object would be highlighted. Emphasis was placed on developing different pedagogical approaches that would inculcate a political conscience among visitors. In particular, the mission-driven museums of the revolution engaged in the musealization of an idea, a process. They did this by severing their ties with earlier approaches toward museums as vessels that stored material proof of historic events, and this opened a space for rethinking museum

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institutions as “software” (collecting, protecting, communicating) and museology as linking the present moment with the past. Therefore, the object concepts, rather than the objects themselves, which were often not even authentic, came to the fore. Through their publications, the museums of the revolution in Yugoslavia invested efforts to theorize both their own practice, as well as the practices of other museums, especially the NOB and homeland museums, across the Yugoslav territory. Nevertheless, their investment was never capable of producing a clear conceptualization of the “Yugoslav museological school of thought” at least not in the ways that the trademark Soviet scientific framework of museological work was created. Two Yugoslav museologists, Dušan Kojovi´c and Dušan Otaševi´c, conducted the most comprehensive analysis (and database) of the process of Yugoslavization in the museum field. Otaševi´c focused on the origin and development of NOB museums, while Kojovi´c concentrated on the history of the museums of the revolution in Yugoslavia. Their understanding of the missionary aspects was supported predominantly through the discourse of Marxist–Leninist museology. As the most competent Yugoslav theoreticians and curators of the memorial NOB museums and the museums of the revolution in Yugoslavia, Otaševi´c and Kojovi´c (1987, p. 11) emphasized that their deductions “were augmented to a great extent after study visits to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.” Otaševi´c and Kojovi´c (1987, p. 216) considered the museums of the revolution as responsible for bringing “revolutionary change to the museum field” through active, present-centered documentation and presentation, which is how these museums were different compared with museums oriented toward the past. By understanding the revolution as an unfinished phenomenon, that is, by not attributing the character of a past phenomenon to it, Kojovi´c, who was led by the Marxist principle of understanding the role of the museum, viewed the open, active approach to museum documentation (as well as to contemporary collecting) as indispensable. This means that, in his own words, “the historically legitimate conditioned relation between the socialist revolution and further social development is not undermined” Otaševi´c and Kojovi´c (1987, p. 218). In this system of evaluation, Otaševi´c and Kojovi´c (1987, p. 21) emphasized that the role of the moment in which a certain phenomenon is “brought to life” is particularly important. This is because the value of a particular object as a vessel of knowledge must always be current; it must have something that it “offers us today, with which it can

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contribute to the further growth of society.” Similarly, by placing the issue of the memorial phenomenon (and the question of what remains in our memory) at the center of his research, Otaševi´c concluded that the valorization criteria are those that place reflections on an object in someone’s temporary or permanent memory (Otaševi´c 1988, pp. 17–18). By also turning to museologists’ traditions in the Soviet satellite states, Yugoslav museums dedicated to the war and revolution have been discussed in the museological articles of Ižakovi´c (1976, 1981, 1985), ˇ (1972, 1980). All were Hasanagi´c (1975, 1981, 1984), and Cejvan grounded in practice, as strictly speaking they had years of curatorial experience. Museum theory created within and due to Yugoslavia therefore remains recognized only among the domestic expert community. Conversely, there was a group of Yugoslav theorists of museums who were based at universities and who dedicated their work to searching for a specific object of cognition that would legitimize museology as a science, without referring to practice or floating on a metatheoretical level of academic museological discourse. Three key figures were Ivo Maroevi´c, Antun Bauer, and Tomislav Šola. By engaging on the international scene (especially after the establishment of the International Committee for Museology of the International Council of Museums in 1977), they contributed significantly to developing museology as an academic discipline within the European context. They participated in the international exchange of museology’s theoretical instruments, and in the local, Yugoslav (and later post-Yugoslav context), they established frameworks for researching heritage. Bauer’s contribution was twofold. On the one hand, he was a museum theoretician who was active in publishing throughout the twentieth century, having written not only in the field of museology, but also in archaeology and art history. On the other hand, his greatest contribution—as he himself stated in “stepping out of the darkness by becoming a part of European civilization through the consecration of cultural consciousness” (Zgaga 2000, p. 170)—was his establishing the Museum Documentation Center in 1964. This was the first (and to this day remains the only) archive in the (post-)Yugoslav sphere that protects museological studies and documents museum (Yugoslav and Croatian) institutions (from internal protocols and concepts to catalogs and posters). Also, he founded postgraduate studies in museology at the University of Zagreb (1996), (Maroevi´c 1984, p. 16) and established the

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museological journal Muzeologija (published since 1953). The crowning achievement of his fifty-year career, as Bauer sees it, was the affirmation of museology as a science, proving that it is “one thing to be a specialist – archaeologist, for instance, and another thing entirely, to be a museum-archaeologist who will use their profession to spread the museum mission within society” (Šola 1983, pp. 7–10). Bauer thought that the museum’s task was to protect the manifestation of human spirit within an object and to be able to communicate it to the visitor. Consequently, how museums elaborated objects define what makes that item an object of knowledge and not merely a thing, or in Bauer’s words, “the museum does not collect objects, it creates them” (as cited in Laszlo 1994, p. 37). Following this train of thought, the famous Czechoslovak museologist Stránský defined the phenomenon of museality as an object of knowledge for museology, thus defining the ontological framework of museology as a science. The aim the museum serves and which also all the preceding forms of the museum in the lapse of time served is the expression of man’s specific attitude to reality. This attitude is intrinsically linked with the historical existence of man, which finds its expression in the inclination to acquire and preserve, against the laws of change and extinction, authentic representatives of value, whose preservation and use helps to form and strengthen the human and cultural profile of man. For this specific aspect of reality determined by the above attitude, I have coined the term museality. The historical mission of museology, in my opinion, rests in its task to interpret scientifically this specific attitude of man to reality and to make us understand museality in its historical and social context. (Stránský 1979, pp. 12–13)

As Bauer’s successor at the department of museology in Zagreb, Maroevi´c continued the tradition of theorizing the foundations and role of museology. His definition of museality, which follows his own reasoning, claimed that “museality is always rediscovered in the numerous communication processes between the visitor and cultural heritage” (Maroevi´c 1995, p. 30). He further explained:

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Museality is an attribute of a heritage object which in one reality makes it an object of another reality, to testify to the past in the present, to reflect the real world in museums, to be carriers of messages – of a former spatial relation – in a certain space. Museality is immanent to objects. Its sources are authentic when objects acquire them in creation, and they are added if they are accumulated through life and through being bound to a certain space, people or society, and events or time. (Maroevi´c 2003, p. 13)

Hence, he does not observe museality merely in the context of museum objects. Rather, he considers the possibility of extending the scope to places, such as to parks as cultural monuments, urban areas, etc., which brings his interpretation of museality closer to a modern concept of heritage (Vuji´c and Stubli´c 2016, p. 184). Peter van Mensch (2016, p. 18) suggested rethinking the link between the concept of museality (as defined by Stránský) and heritage—as defined by the museologist Laurajane Smith. By criticizing the position that a museum cannot be an object of scientific knowledge, Šola (1984, pp. 10–11) suggested the new term “heritology” in 1982,17 followed by “mnemosophy” in 1989 (Šola 2015). While somewhat less under the influence of Eastern European museological departments and more inclined toward French and British museum thinkers—first Georges Henri Rivière and later Kenneth Hudson—Šola elevated museological discussion to the level of critical heritage studies. The department of museology and heritology at Belgrade University added Šola’s understanding of the science of heritage to its curriculum. The question arises: is theory the key to practice or vice versa? Using the example of Yugoslav museums of recent history, it is possible to conclude that theory and practice had their own histories and that they were barely in contact, never truly intersecting or merging. Non-Aligned Yugoslavia, in searching for an authentic path to socialism, did not issue a decree regulating the “direction” of its theoretical orientation, which would determine the path along which its museums developed. As the previous examples show, although museum practices were overpowered by the East in both carrying out and theorizing practice, the academic community approached museum theory from a pro-Western standpoint. There is an inconsistency even regarding museum laws and regulations and their implementation as a basic terminological framework. This led to the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of new museum institutions that operated without clearly defined norms or a theoretical platform.

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In an interview with Antun Bauer regarding the need to communicate different issues in the museum field of work at the Yugoslavia level, he stated: “The Institute for Comparative Law in Belgrade compared all museum regulations in Yugoslavia and ascertained that among more or less 100 museum concepts, not a single one was processed in the same way by all museum regulations” (Šola 1983, pp. 9–10). The ideological and the conjoined scientific discourse of the times strongly influenced the development and formation of the museums in the segregated Europe of the mid- to late twentieth century. Within this frame of reference, the Yugoslav network of NOB museums flourished and was linked to the development of a new “nonaligned” society based on socialist perspectives. More than any other type of museum, these museums, through their representational and ceremonial functions, were most transparent in illustrating the aspirations and efforts of the Yugoslav state to create a coherent memorial representation of its own sense of ontological legitimacy and esteem.

Conclusion As early as 1945, the new Yugoslav state began to intensively develop a network of memorial museums dedicated to important Second World War events and people. The social role of these NOB museums, named after the People’s Liberation Struggle, was to educate the general public about the Second World War, seeking to address a wide cross section of society by offering historical documentation, while also communicating the ideas of the People’s Liberation Struggle and its spirit of “brotherhood and unity.” The act of nurturing the “NOB and revolutionary traditions” through museum work was understood by the League of Communists of ˇ Yugoslavia as a form of resistance and struggle against nationalism (Cejvan 1972; Pandži´c 1986, pp. 24–26). Considered to be an important “factor” in the development of “socialist culture” (Hasanagi´c 1984, pp. 87– 96), these memorial institutions—viewed as “museums for the people” (Andrejevi´c-Kun 1948, p. 2; Ðuri´c 1949, pp. 3–8)—were established by municipalities, constituent republics, and the Yugoslav federation. In most cases, the curators of the museums of the revolution helped conceptualize the NOB museums’ permanent exhibitions. The museological approach was limited and entailed either reconstructing the historical atmosphere of commemorated events, offering a memorial presentation of a given theme, or a mixture of both.

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Unlike the Yugoslav Second World War monuments, which clearly broke with Soviet aesthetics from the early 1950s, the impact of the Soviet model on NOB museums, despite fading over time, nevertheless remained the dominant museographic18 matrix. The motive of appealing to the masses, which underpinned the museum narrative, resulted in exhibitions overloaded with archival materials—textual and photographic materials arranged on wall panels. Nevertheless, “socialist modernism”—as the official aesthetic language that Yugoslavia relied on to convey its nonaligned position—did not hesitate to combine modernisms from both poles of the global Cold War divide. In the 1960s it created a space for the mass use of ambient art installations in People’s Liberation Struggle displays. Through open calls, renowned artists were commissioned to create series of works for museum exhibitions. This resulted in the combining of rigidly composed textual exhibition sections that were replete with praise for the Party and Josip Broz Tito, supported by archivalia. However, it also resulted in technologically and artistically innovative museum interior designs atypical for the European socialist states of the mid- to late twentieth century. Especially from the 1970s, practical and theoretical considerations in Yugoslavia showed an obvious convergence between methodological foundations examined in the West and the working principles found in Soviet museological collections. However, Yugoslav nonaligned museology was never established as a term. Rather, one can detect ways of applying different museographies and museologies that were, at the time, developed in the West (England or West Germany for instance) and in the East (especially in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union). The progressive nature of Yugoslav museologists is obvious in the example of founding institutions such as the Museum Documentation Center (MDC), which was established as a concept in 1955, but started work in 1968. The MDC was a pioneering venture in a larger European context, considering that the ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) Documentation Center in Paris was not founded until the 1960s (Maroevi´c 1998, p. 81). Also, the role of institutional support for the procedural and methodological implementation of museology as an academic discipline in Europe was reinforced by the launch of a museology course at Zagreb University by 1966. Indeed, by 1983 it was possible to defend doctoral dissertations in the field of museum studies.

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The faith that the government placed in the power of NOB iconography remained unperturbed until the last days of Yugoslavia. Even with the economic crisis, which ultimately broke Yugoslavia, in 1989 banknotes were issued with images of the memorial areas in Sutjeska, Kozara, Jajce, and Kragujevac on their reverse side. That same year the iron curtain fell, and the museologist Jadranka Vinterhalter (1989, pp. 5–6) wrote that it was high time for the Yugoslav museums to be modernized, both with the introduction of new technologies and the revision of their content. Furthermore, an idea for a new concept was underway in the museums of the revolution in Zagreb, Split, Novi Sad, and Belgrade. Instead of planned modernization, in the 1990s the museums of the revolution transformed into the national history museums of the Yugoslav successor states and the NOB museums were damaged or plundered during the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, while in Serbia they were either ignored by the new authorities or damaged.

Notes 1. During the Yugoslav period, in Croatia there were seven museums of the revolution: in Makarska, Pula, Rijeka, Slavonski Brod, Split, and Zagreb. It is interesting, however, that although there were museums of the revolution in Kosovo and Vojvodina (i.e., in two of Serbia’s provinces), Serbia itself never had its own Museum of the Revolution of the Republic of Serbia because the Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities was in Belgrade. 2. Synopses of the permanent exhibitions of the Museum “25 May” in Drvar and the Museum “the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle” are available in the archive of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. I would like to thank the curator Elma Hodži´c for insight into these documents. 3. Museums of the revolution had the most prolific publishing activities in Yugoslavia. 4. See 1949. Reorganizacija naših muzeja. Muzeji 3–4: 1–10. No author. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Izveštaj o stanju muzeja na podruˇcju NRBiH, p. 11, AJ, SUBNOR Org. j. Komisija za negovanje revolucionarnih tradicija, Opšti materijali o muzjima i izgradnji Muzeja u T. Užicu, 1953–1961, f 97. 8. See the publications: 1980 Important Cultural Institutions in Yugoslavia. Belgrade: Federal Administration for International Scientific, Educational,

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Cultural and Technical Cooperation (no report author has been signed) and 1982. Muzeji, galerije i zbirke Bosne i Hercegovine. Sarajevo: Društvo muzejskih radnika Bosne i Hercegovine. See also Šulc (1984). I have borrowed the translation of the phrase “in fondo” from the museologist Jan Dolák. See Dolák (2022, p. 97). All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated. See Savez udruženja boraca NOR-a. 1951–1962. Hemeroteka (newspaper articles). Arhiv Jugoslavije (Archive of Yugoslavia), fond 297, folder 206. Museality should be understood here as a specific value of the museum object that speaks in the “present” moment about the “past,” in the sense that it was explained by Stránský. For more, see Stránský (1994, p. 50). Fachstelle für Heimatmuseen beim Ministerium für Kultur, Halle/Saale (ed.) 1960. Beiträge zur sowjetischen Museumskunde: Heft 1. Translated from Russian by Annemarie Hille and Ernst Ullmann, p. 23. Halle/Saale: Fachstelle für Heimatmuseen beim Ministerium für Kultur. The body of the museum object is understood here as that part of the image of the exhibit that is created in a direct interaction with its observer. The tenets of Soviet museology were printed in Moscow in 1955 (Osnovy sovetskogo muzeevedenija) and were soon to be translated and used in the socialist part of Europe as a handbook for museum work and as a source for creating museum theory. In using the term “museography,” I refer exclusively to curatorial methods for creating collections and exhibitions. In other words, museography only deals with the practical aspect of museum function. The term “heritology” was first used by Tomislav Šola at the meeting of the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM), in 1982, in Paris, at the symposium The Systems of Museology and Interdisciplinarity. There is a clear distinction in the use of the term museography as opposed to museology. Museography implies the interpretation of museum practice, while museology entails theorizing the museum in the wider framework of positing heritage production.

References Andrejevi´c-Kun, Nada. 1948. Zadaci muzeja u novim društvenim uslovima u našoj zemlji. Muzeji 1: 1–4. Austin, John L. 1962. How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. James O. Urmson. London: Oxford University Press. Babi´c, Katarina, and Viktorija Durbeši´c. 1975. Znanstveni zadaci u muzejima revolucije, odjelima narodnooslobodilaˇcke borbe i socijalistiˇcke revolucije

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Belgrade: Federal Administration for International Scientific, Educational, Cultural and Technical Cooperation. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 . New York: Pantheon. Gavrilovi´c, Ljiljana. 2009. O politikama, identitetima i druge muzejske priˇce. Beograd: Etnografski Institut SANU. Goskul’tprosvetizdat. 1955. Osnovy sovetskogo muzeevedenija. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo kul’turno-prosvetitel’noj literatury. Harvey, David C. 2001. Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies 7 (4): 319–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/13581650120105534. Hasanagi´c, Edib. 1975. Istorijski muzeji i savremeni svet. Muzeologija 17: 14–23. https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/149374. Accessed 30 May 2021. Hasanagi´c, Edip. 1981. Uloga i djelatnost muzeja po odredbama novih zakona o muzejima. Zbornik radova Muzeja revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine 5–6: 539–544. Hasanagi´c, Edip. 1984. Muzeji kao faktor socijalistiˇcke kulture. Zbornik X kongresa SDMRJ: 87–92. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ižakovi´c, Krešimir. 1976. Muzej Prvog zasjedanja AVNOJ-a, Biha´c: osvrt na muzejsku izložbu o Izvršnom odboru AVNOJ-a. Informatica museologica 7 (3–4): 63–66. https://hrcak.srce.hr/146518. Accessed 30 May 2021. Ižakovi´c, Krešimir. 1981. Rad na stalnoj izložbenoj postavci Muzeja I zasjedanja AVNOJ-a u Biha´cu. Zbornik Radova Muzeja Revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine 5–6: 747–752. Ižakovi´c, Krešimir. 1985. Nauˇcno-istraživaˇcka i sabiraˇcka djelatnost u muzejima i srodnim institucijama novije historije. Master’s thesis, Sveuˇcilište u Zagrebu. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2016. Museum (Re)public. Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta LXIV: 105–119. https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI1601105J. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2017a. Jugoslavizacija muzejskog polja. Zbornik Radova Historijskog Muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine 12: 11–19. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2017b. Walking Heritage: Performance as a Method of Transmitting a Confiscated Memory and Identity. In Nostalgia on the Move, ed. Mirjana Slavkovi´c and Marija Ðorgovi´c, 84–94. Belgrade: Muzej Jugoslavije. Jagdhuhn, Nataša. 2021. The Post-Yugoslav Kaleidoscope: Curatorial Tactics in the (Ethno) Nationalization of Second World War Memorial Museums in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia, ed. Gruia B˘adescu, Britt Baillie, and Francesco Mazzucchelli, 295–322. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kanižaj, Ljerka. 1987. Obrazovanje u muzeju: stanje u muzejima Jugoslavije. Informatica museologica 18 (1–4): 5–8. https://hrcak.srce.hr/145360. Accessed 2 February 2019. Kastratovi´c Risti´c, Veselinka. 2008. Nastajanje i nestajanje jednog muzeja. In Muzeji kao mesta pomirenja, ed. Slad-ana Bojkovi´c and Ana Stoli´c, 326–340. Belgrade: Istorijski muzej Srbije. Kirn, Gal, and Burghardt Robert. 2011. Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Between Memorial Genre, Revolutionary Aesthetics and Ideological Recuperation. Manifesta Journal 16: 66–75. Kneževi´c, Ðurd-a. 1986. Prezentacija historijske grad-e u muzejima revolucije. Informatica museologica 17 (1–4): 45. https://hrcak.srce.hr/145525. Accessed 20 February 2019. Krivošejev, Vladimir. 2011. Muzejska politika u Srbiji: Nastajanje, kriza i novi poˇcetak. Kultura, cˇasopis za teoriju i sociologiju kulture i kulturnu politiku 130: 291–317. Belgrade: Zavod za prouˇcavanje kulturnog razvitka. https:// doi.org/10.5937/kultura1130291K. Lacan, Jacques. 1978. What is a Picture? In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, 67–78. New York: W. W. Norton. Laszlo, Želimir. 1994. Zaštita muzejske grad-e u djelu Antuna Bauera. Muzeologija 31: 37–42. https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/132606. Accessed 9 June 2019. Laszlo, Želimir. 1997. Is a Museology Part of the Science of Information? In Museology for Tomorrow’s World: Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Masaryk University, Brno, October 9–11, 1996, ed. Zbynˇek Z. Stránský, 59–64. Munich: Verlag Dr. Christian Müller-Straten. Macdonald, Sharon. 2003. Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities. Museum and Society 1 (1): 1–16. Maliˇci´c, Zlatko. 1984. Zbirke novije istorije u muzejima i zbirkama u Bosni i Hercegovini. Master’s thesis, Sveuˇcilište u Zagrebu. Maroevi´c, Ivo. 1984. Studij muzeologije na Filozofskom fakultetu u Zagrebu. Informatica museologica 15 (1–3): 15–16. https://hrcak.srce.hr/145752. Accessed 6 April 2020. Maroevi´c, Ivo. 1986. Identity as Constituent Part of Identity. In Museology and Identity, ed. Vinoš Sofka, 183–188. Conference proceedings, ICOM/ICOFOM. Buenos Aires: ICOFOM Study Series 10. Maroevi´c, Ivo. 1995. The Museum Message: Between the Document and Information. In Museum, Media, Message, ed. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 24–36. London: Routledge. Maroevi´c, Ivo. 1998. Introduction to Museology: The European Approach. Munich: Verlag Dr. C. Müller-Straten. Maroevi´c, Ivo. 2003. Muzejska izložba – muzeološki izazov. Informatica museologica 34 (3): 13–18. https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/207119. Accessed 8 August 2020.

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PART II

Second World War Memorial Museums in the Yugoslav Successor States (1991–2022)

CHAPTER 4

Broken Museality

Abstract This chapter outlines the abrupt ideological turn in the interpretation of Second World War history in postsocialist, postconflict Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. The destruction of the People’s Liberation Struggle museums in the nineties wars, and the destruction of many exhibits, became acts that entailed a material reckoning with objects that had previously been protected by joint conventions. Some of the war-desecrated exhibits became a testimony to the broken link between the community and memory in peacetime. The chapter closes with a mapping of Second World War memorial museums in the individual Yugoslav successor states, and it gives a brief overview of changes in the status, name, and social role of these museums. It thus illustrates the main logics undergirding the revision of history and historical revisionism in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Introduction In Yugoslavia, the memory of the Second World War was a question of national importance. The Second World War period overshadowed all other epochs and the wartime events were the main topic covered in history textbooks, museums, and in the public sphere more generally (Hoepken 1998, p. 196). Socialist Yugoslav identity drew its strength © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_4

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from a narrative of the Partisans’ heroic efforts in the war, dedicated to liberation and the building of a socially equal society. Besides the first official multiparty elections in Yugoslavia and the disintegration of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia at its fourteenth congress in 1990, the politics of national centrism and revisionist historiography (Kulji´c 2002, p. 9) strongly influenced the interpretation of the Second World War (B˘adescu et al. 2021, pp. 10–12). After four decades of the hyperproduction of a uniform, ideologically motivated memory of the Second World War and the socialist revolution, the Yugoslav industry of memories was gradually privatized. The alreadyexisting covert rejection of official policies of remembrance, whether through indifference toward or even the demolition of memorial plaques or the commemoration of members of Chetnik or Ustashe formations (Ðureinovi´c 2020, p. 36; Bergholz 2006, p. 88; 2010, p. 14), became omnipresent in public space in the 1990s. The state budget ran dry, which led to an economic crisis and too much state debt. In turn, laws were implemented that transferred workers’ collectively owned property into state ownership and then privatized it. The “unity” of the socialist period disappeared, and nationalist parties emerged that annihilated the ideology of “brotherhood.” By the end of the 1980s, the power of a federal politics of memory that functioned across the republics, whose programs had been guided by the Federation of Veterans’ Associations from the People’s Liberation War (Savez udruženja boraca Narodnooslobilaˇckog rata, SUBNOR)—including its republic, regional, and local branches— was significantly usurped by the self-proclaimed representatives of various national interests. The band that had held together the unitary politics of memory loosened, which led to memory overflowing, moving toward its decommunization and nationalization. The common denominator for this reversal in the politics of memory was defined by reappropriating memories of the Second World War—the separating of a (“dubious”) other antifascism from our (“truthful”) antifascism—motivated by the creation of a monoethnic collective identity. The stretching of the previously “dense” memory politics, under pressure from the Party, had to lead to the crumbling and final dismembering of the former shared concept of socialist heritage. Consequently, museality, as the link between heritage and identity—between sociocultural values and museum objects—was broken.

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The struggle for one’s own piece of memory also entailed a struggle to abolish the Communist Party’s monopoly over Yugoslav memory in general. This entailed creating independent, nationally oriented memory communities. The rigid interpretation of Partisan Yugoslavism, woven into the heritage of the Second World War, resulted in the “repressive erasure” (Connerton 2008) and demonization of the entire culture of memory created and cultivated in Yugoslavia. This was followed by the destruction of heritage during the war period in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter BiH) and thus the (trans)formation of an entirely new memoryscape (Pavlakovi´c 2021, p.12). The catastrophic financial situation, alongside the military climate, defined the entire decade of the 1990s and the museums’ inability to function in that period. After the wars ended, this made decision-making regarding the protection and restoration of museums in Yugoslavia’s successor states even more difficult.

Revision: Raising a Heritage Dissonance From the mid-1980s, the already-slackening federation (after changes to the constitution in 1974) was intensely affected by a shift toward a competitive economy and a competitive memory (Ramet 2007). The destruction of myths regarding the moral purity of the antifascist Partisan struggle broke the foundations of the supranational Yugoslav community. From Tito’s death (1980) until the first official multiparty elections in Yugoslavia (1990), the public memory of the war and the revolution was still orchestrated top-down from the “center,” but in journeying to the individual republics, this public memory reached different groups and assumed various biases and forms. SUBNOR was the former “headquarters” that packaged and transmitted the tradition of the People’s Liberation Struggle, yet they were incapable of resisting the divisive murmurs that rose from below. This led to a general tendency in the early 1990s of marking Second World War heritage as reminders of an unwanted past (Naef and Ploner 2016). By insisting on the dissonant1 aspects of Second World War heritage, the political right designated the People’s Liberation Struggle monuments and museums as outmoded and propagandistic, undesirable, and thus as “dissonant heritage” (Šeši´c 2011, p. 35). The breadth of the problem of “transitional heritage” (Demeter 2017) requires a deeper politicohistorical contextualization. The next sections

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therefore offer a broad outline of the political scene and its influence on changes in the paradigm of Second World War memory in the moments surrounding Yugoslavia’s breakup, with a special emphasis on the period from 1990–2000 as the decade in which the ideological foundations for a revised history and historical revisionism were laid. The focus here is limited to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Croatia In the early 1990s, the inflaming of rhetoric dealing with Second World War memory resulted in revived memories in Serbia of Ustashe mass crimes against Serbs (Glaurdi´c 2011, p. 52). This was provoked in Croatia by the denial of the genocidal nature of the Jasenovac concentration camp and sympathy in the public sphere toward Ustashe symbols (Denich 2000, p. 54). In comparison with Serbia, the wave of anticommunism in Croatia had been much stronger and more direct because the Croatian exit from Yugoslavia had also been interpreted as liberation from a Serbian diktat present in both Yugoslavias. Franjo Tudjman, the head of a nationalist-oriented political party, the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, hereafter HDZ), which was founded in 1989, was the first democratically elected president of Croatia (1990). Building on an anticommunist discourse, his political agenda supported the equating of communism and fascism as two totalitarian regimes: this led him to use rhetoric that minimized the importance of Jasenovac victims (Tudjman 1989, p. 316). He also stirred up sympathy for the victims at Bleiburg (the Partisan-led massacre of soldiers and civilians associated with the Axis powers in May 1945).2 Above all, the mission underpinning his historically revisionist politics was to promote national reconciliation between Croat members of the Partisan movement and Ustashe movement. In order to establish a historical balance between two ideologies, it was necessary to dismantle the role of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the Second World War, with the goal of exposing the victims of the military units under its command. However, it also uncritically justified the Independent State of Croatia’s status as a puppet government, because as Tudjman strategically formulated it (ignoring historical facts): “It wasn’t only a fascist creation but also the expression of the centuries-old striving of the Croatian people for an independent state.”3 As the prominent Croatian historians Slavko and Ivo Goldstein emphasized:

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Exposing Partisan and communist crimes became a media sensation and was used as propaganda material for provoking xenophobic and political incitement, and the Ustashe crimes were covered up in a mist of relativization, justification and suppression.4 (Goldstein S. and Goldstein I. 2011, p. 244)

The revisionist fervor of the Croatian political elite of the 1990s culminated in various proposals for reconstructing the Jasenovac Memorial Site into a memorial center for the victims of fascism and communism (Štahan 2017). Tudjman’s suggestion of “mixing the bones” of the dead members of the quisling forces and the Ustashe killed in Bleiburg with the bones of those killed in Jasenovac was met with criticism from all sides, both in Croatia and internationally, and thus never came about (Czerwinski ´ 2016, p. 7). During Tudjman’s presidency, the mythologization led the number of Bleiburg victims to increase tenfold. In turn, this “infected Croatian public life and even gained the sponsorship of parliament” (Goldstein 2011, p. 206). As the historian Vjeran Pavlakovi´c has insightfully noticed: In addition to the commemorating of the innocent civilian victims or the liquidated members of the Home Guard units (i.e., of the regular army of the Independent State of Croatia), the new cultural memory constructed in post-Communist Croatia threatened to “wash” from the Ustasha movement all its genocidal politics, its connection to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and its totalitarian nature. The annual commemoration in Bleiburg which over time came to symbolically encompass all Croatian victims from 1945 and later is an expression of the complexity of particular traumatic memories, especially when they become the instruments of politics and new myths. (Pavlakovi´c 2009, p. 173)

From the 1990s onward, even though Franjo Tudjman did not appear at the commemorations, the Croatian parliament and therefore state stood behind the ceremony at Bleiburg, which thus became “one of the central sites of Croatian nationalist mobilization” (Suboti´c 2015, p. 195). The number and identity of the victims, as with Jasenovac, remained subject to political manipulation. The Bleiburg commemorations from 1990 to the present day are a good example of how changes in government, from the HDZ of the 1990s to the present day, transformed the discourse of the victimization of the Croatian people in order to construct a national mythology (Kolstø 2010), so that the “suffering of Croats” in Bleiburg was linked in the 1990s to the suffering of Croats due to Serb aggression.

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Somewhat later, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, “the question of war crimes and accusations against the Croatian generals entered the discourse about Bleiburg” (Pavlakovi´c 2009, p. 187). The Bleiburg commemorations, especially those of the 1990s, are also of great importance for normalizing the Ustashe coat of arms, given that it was on the souvenirs being sold that celebrated the Independent State of Croatia. As in 1990s Serbia when the public sphere had been flooded with Chetnik iconography, Ustashe symbols entered the public domain in 1990s Croatia in the form of graffiti as well as in stadiums and at the concerts of Marko Perkovi´c (founder of the band Thompson),5 where the Ustashe slogan “For the Home(land)—ready!” (“Za dom spremni!”) was chanted.6 During the 1990s, the changes in the Second World War narrative in textbooks were most apparent in the deideologization of the narrative, “cleaning” the textbooks of pro-Yugoslav ideology and introducing a discourse of “national affirmation” (Koren 2007). In keeping with the context in which it emerged, Peri´c’s textbook, which was used up to 1996, was a black and white text that “unburden[ed] the Ustashe past of fascism” (Kulji´c 2005, p.175) and conveyed “the martyrdom of Croats in Yugoslavia, and the bright moment of Croatia winning independence and breaking from Yugoslavia” (Mareti´c 2013, p.13). The interpretation of a change in the historical narrative, for example in school textbooks, must be understood in relation to the turbulent war and postwar years in which it occurred. However, the foundations of this ideological turn in the 1990s were only somewhat deconstructed or revised later. It was never replaced with anything new, as was well observed by historian Snježana Koren: In all the existing schoolbooks that deal with the history of the twentieth century, the interpretational scheme formed in the first half of the 1990s is always still dominant, and the basic ideological element that pervades this scheme is significantly more visible in some schoolbooks depending on how their authors position themselves in relation to the heritage of the 1990s. (Koren 2009, p. 261)

During the 1990s, amid a political wave of “national reconciliation,” Bleiburg victims have been mentioned so far in relation to Jasenovac commemorations, while from 2000 the HDZ broke away from the 1990s

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discourse wherein the Independent State of Croatia’s ideology was justified through its struggle for independence. Instead, the HDZ emphasized the importance of the 1991–1995 Croatian War of Independence (also known as the Homeland War) in the fight for the freedom and independence of contemporary Croatia, and the victims of the Homeland War were also mentioned when honoring the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp (Radonji´c 2010). It can be surmised that the main cut in the political memory of the Second World War in Croatia can be found in the transition from the nineties to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The HDZ reformed itself in this period and the criminal, fascist character of the Independent State of Croatia was once again acknowledged. However, this did not result in a celebration of the Partisans at anywhere near the levels they had enjoyed in Yugoslavia; a new type of antifascist value was sought in narratives of the Homeland War (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 387), which now has a state monopoly like the Second World War had in Yugoslavia. This politics has resulted in an ambivalent state attitude toward the history of the Second World War. Therefore, the prime minister Andrej Plenkovi´c (in office since October 2016) announced that the state expects the experts to do their job, in a reference to the founding of the Council for Dealing with Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes, set up by the government of the Republic of Croatia in 2017. This led to the establishment of two parallel memory cultures, one red and one black (Pavlakovi´c 2016, p. 117). Members of the red memory culture regularly gather in large numbers in Kumrovec (Josip Broz Tito’s birthplace) or in Tjentište (the site of the Battle on Sutjeska, in which many Partisans from Croatia died in the Second World War). When gathering, they often wear the five-pointed star or carry pictures of Tito or of other notable Partisans. Meanwhile, members of the black memory culture regularly gather for the commemorations at Bleiburg (where many Ustashe and Home Guard soldiers and some civilians were murdered in 1945), wearing various Ustashe symbols. Each group not only represents the supporters of a particular ideological interpretation of the 1941–1945 war but also a group of people who are living (in) the past.

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Bosnia and Herzegovina The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 1980s and early 1990s was even more complicated, especially as concerns the demographic characteristics of the population. In the pivotal historic moment when Bosnia and Herzegovina (after Croatia) called a referendum (1992) in which its citizens decided to separate from Yugoslavia, the Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka, hereafter SDS) called on Serbs to boycott the referendum. The SDS drew on an ideological framework that mobilized the memory of Serb suffering in the Independent State of Croatia, and their rationale became known as the political project of “all the Serbs in one state.” The rise of nationally oriented politics in the 1990s in Bosnia and Herzegovina (through the Bosniak nationalist Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije, SDA), the SDS and the HDZ) amid historical revision and revisionism regarding the Second World War induced an atmosphere of reciprocal fear between the ethnic groups, and ultimately resulted in a war with catastrophic human and material losses.7 The war lasted until 1995 and ended with the Dayton agreement. Peace did not bring reconciliation. Almost three decades after the conflict, each ethnic group uses its own name for the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serb name translates as the Patriotic Defensive War, the Croat name as the Homeland War, and the Bosniak name as the Aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Proposals for a referendum on the majority-Serb region, Republika Srpska, are being voiced louder than ever before, while from 2017 the Croat member of the presidency of ˇ c, has hinted that the possibility of constructing a third BiH, Dragan Covi´ Croatian entity should be revisited with specific suggestions made. In summary, as the political scientist Antonio Pehar has astutely observed: The Dayton Peace Agreement essentially maintained the territorial division that emerged because of the war, and the new political framework encouraged the ethnopolitical divisions. The instrumentalization of the fragmented ethnocracy has led expressly to human and civil rights being breached, as was warned against in the 2009 judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, which confirmed the violated rights of the plaintiffs Dervo Sejdi´c and Jakob Finci. Because of their Roma and Jewish origins, they are not able to run as candidates in elections for members of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the House of Peoples of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH since they are not members of one

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of the three constitutive Bosnian-Herzegovinian peoples. It is important to emphasize that not one of the most significant problems has been able to be resolved by mutual agreement among the leading national parties in the postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Pehar 2014, p. 9)

The once-unified vision of the past is divided into three (para)histories— Bosniak, Serbian, and Croatian/Bosnian-Herzegovinian (Torsti 2007; Baranovicé 2001). Education policy also regulates the politics of memory (Trbovac and Trošt 2017). Therefore, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the creation of education policies along ethnic lines aims to homogenize the members of an ethnic community. This is implemented in schools using four history textbooks titled: Historija (the Bosnian word for history), Istorija, and Dodatak (a translation from Serbian would be History and Supplement ), and Povijest (the Croatian word for history). By analyzing the printed history schoolbooks for the eighth grade (age thirteen to fourteen) used in the crucial years of 1999–2000,8 the political scientist Pilvi Torsti (2003, p. 191) concluded that “the narratives of the books have the tendency to use former wars as a metaphor for the recent war and as a provocative way to describe the cruelties of war in general.” Through a discursive analysis of the textbooks, while concentrating on representations of both world wars and the wars of the nineties, the author arrives at the following conclusion: In the Bosniak book Historija, the presentation was technical, adhering to a very general level without becoming emotional at any point. In contrast, the Croat book Povijest presented the local aspects of war in dramatic terms. In the Serb books Istorija and Dodatak, we can note the detailed military description and emotionally-loaded description of horrors. (Torsti 2003, p. 190)

Each successor state’s interpretations of the Second World War should be differentiated. In the Republika Srpska schoolbooks, the emphasis is on the suffering of Serbs during the Second World War but also on the Partisan struggle, which is glorified. In the Croatian schoolbooks, even though the positive role of the Partisans in the liberation is clearly highlighted, their cruel reprisals at Bleiburg are also emphasized. The Bosniak schoolbooks underline the Partisan’s role in the liberation, but also the large-scale destruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the war and the disproportionately high number of Bosnian Muslim deaths in relation to other ethnic groups (Torsti 2003, pp. 170–88).

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It can be concluded that the role of the Partisans in each ethnic group is used insofar as it contributes to national cohesion. A detailed analysis of how the Chetnik formations are mentioned in each individual schoolbook is beyond the scope of this book, but only in the Serbian schoolbook are they presented as “antioccupational” forces, while in the Croatian and Bosniak schoolbooks they are expressly referred to as collaborationist forces and as military units responsible for numerous crimes against civilians (Trbovc and Trošt 2017). Even though the goals are different, the methods for creating national histories are the same. Given that these schoolbooks appeared during or immediately after the war, the discourse of the “enemy” (embodied in symbols referring to the Chetniks, Ustashe and Balije)9 was a way of applying the brakes to and stopping the wheel of history in Bosnia and Herzegovina, instead of pushing it back to the Second World War period (Bougarel 1999, p. 157). Considering that the Croatian and Serbian versions of history in Bosnia and Herzegovina are contingent on the revisions made to history schoolbooks in the neighboring states of Serbia and Croatia, it should be stressed that the greatest degree of political instrumentalization present in the Bosniak schoolbook Historija is an attempt to draw up a thesis that “equated the current Serbian aggression with the battles of the Chetniks in the Second World War” (Pingel 2009, p. 260). Given these political divisions, Bosnia and Herzegovina is often called a non-functioning state (Hoare 2011) publicly, by the protagonists of the political scene there as well as by international mediators in the country (e.g., the Office of the High Representative, EU representatives, etc.). After the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed, the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with six other cultural institutions (National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Museum of Literature and Theater, the National Library for the Visually Impaired, and the National Film Archive) were left at the state level without legal protection and a resolved system of financing (Banjeglav 2019, p. 7). While the authorities in the federation had ignored these cultural and memorial institutions of national significance, from the period of war10 until the present day, the Republika Srpska has invested—and is investing—more in national heritage institutions, and it has passed the most advanced set of laws in this field.11 However, a review of what the governments of all three constitutive peoples have done to renovate the Second World War museums reveals

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that government interference has left somewhat different traces with respect to changes in the historical narrative. While in Republika Srpska the strategy of nationalizing the history of the Second World War has developed by constructing a narrative of martyrdom by drawing historical parallels between the suffering of Serbs in the Second World War and in the wars of the 1990s (e.g., the Museum of Republika Srpska, the Museum of Old Herzegovina, the Museum “First Proletarian Brigade”), such a strategy is not visible in the entity named the Federation of BiH (Jagdhuhn 2021, p. 313). The museums on the territory of the Federation of BiH have mostly been renovated in a way that does not intervene in the Second World War exhibitions created in Yugoslavia. Interestingly, the former People’s Liberation Struggle museums (e.g., the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session, the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva”) have been left as “frozen memory,” and they are used as platforms for political campaigns. Indeed, they are places from which to propagate—after Yugoslavia, “Bosnian museums”—a politics of integrative patriotism (Jagdhuhn 2021, p. 309). It should be remembered that the Bosniak history schoolbook Historija, published in 2007 (Karge and Batarilo 2008, p. 18), includes both Latin and Cyrillic script for this reason. One can conclude that “in the Federation the old official narrative of the Second World War has been accepted in a biased way, and this depends on how important it is for the promotion of the continuity of Bosnian and Herzegovinian statehood” (Karaˇci´c 2012, p. 24). Serbia The Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistiˇcka partija Srbije, hereinafter SPS) arose from the merging of the League of Communists of Serbia and the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia in 1990. Its leader was Slobodan Miloševi´c, who was appointed president of the Republic of Serbia at the end of the same year in multiparty elections. The reformed communists, or “new socialists,” introduced the discourse of national memory into Serbian society via the theme of martyrdom, chiefly in political and journalistic circles. The nationalist impetus that resulted from this politics is clear to read in the instrumentalization of the Kosovo myth as the “cradle” of Serbian identity (Peši´c 1996, p. 16). By mobilizing the “Serbian fear of vanishing” and the idea of Kosovo as the “Serbian

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Jerusalem” (Suboti´c 2016), Miloševi´c wanted to justify his decision to alter the constitution and withdraw the autonomy of the two autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Metohija and Vojvodina). Besides activities such as lectures and publications, the Serbian Orthodox Church’s contribution to the nationalization of memory is manifest in a tendency that became an established practice during the 1990s: holding liturgies at memorial sites of great human loss from the Second World War. The act of paying homage exclusively to Serbian victims from Second World War at Yugoslav memorial sites aimed to mobilize a nationalist politics, which built on the victimization of Serbs in the Second World War to fuel vengeful impulses in society. Given that this practice was established in the years of the military conflict (1991–1995), these commemorations functioned as political acts and provided an interpretational framework of “justification” (Stojanovi´c 2011). By drawing a hypothetical historical parallel, they justified Serbia’s role in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Croatia. The driving myth behind Serbian national identity was clear to see in the clericalization of Second World War memory. Liturgies were given by the Serbian Patriarch Pavle in 1993 in the Kozara Memorial Park, in the Prijedor municipality in which thousands of Bosniaks were interned in 1992. Many didn’t survive internment in the concentration camps of Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje run by Bosnian Serb forces. Biljana Plavši´c stood in the front row of the liturgy, at that time a member of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Republika Srpska. The headline “Now the innocent can rest in peace” (Karaˇci´c 2012, p. 59) featured on the front cover of the journal Kozarski Vjesnik (October 22, 1993). A monumental cross was specially made for this occasion and was placed at the entrance to the Kozara Memorial Park. Even today (in 2022) it continues to stand in the memorial area, while the slogan of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Second World War has been dismantled (Greiff 2018, p. 81). A sermon on the suffering of Serbs in the Second World War by a high-ranking church dignitary, given during a period of military conflict, marked a turning point in how the Serbian political memory of the Second World War is represented, both in Serbia and in Republika Srpska. This led to historical parallels between the two wars being made, in which Serbs were predominantly the victims and always on the side of the antifascists (Brenner 2013, p. 81). These shifts enabled the prime minister of Republika Srpska to declare at a commemoration in 2008: “Kozara

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is the foundation of Republika Srpska” (Žrtve se ne smiju zaboraviti. Nezavisne novine, July 6, 2008 as cited in Šahovi´c and Zulumovi´c 2015, p. 219). Similarly, the president of Republika Srpska at the time, Milorad Dodik, was able to announce to citizens gathered at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle on Kozara: Kozara’s people expected that they would be killed, and this occurred systematically throughout the years of this war, as well as those of the patriotic war. People from Kozara remember this, which is why a significant number of them joined the units of the Army of Republika Srpska and fought for Republika Srpska itself. (Nezavisne novine 2017)

The joint organization by Serbia and Republika Srpska of the commemoration of the Battle on Kozara and of the suffering of civilians during the Second World War in the Kozara area has become an established practice. It inflames the victim-oriented politics of memory of the “two Serbian peoples,” as can often be heard in the political phrases used by speakers at the commemorations. When celebrating three decades of the existence of Republika Srpska (January 9, 2022) in Banja Luka, the prime minister of Serbia, Ana Brnabi´c, stated that Republika Srpska was created so that the genocide against Serbs from the Second World War would not be repeated in the 1990s (Politika online 2022). To institutionalize the narrative of the Serbian people as victims, the Museum of Genocide Victims (founded in 1992) focused on the “collection, maintenance, storage, and presentation of data and materials on genocide against the Serbian people in its ethnic and state areas, as well as against other peoples, especially against Jews and Roma” (Ðuri´c Mišina 2015, p. 16). Like the first revision of the history textbooks from 1993, the goal of building a museum to genocide victims entailed adapting the history of earlier periods to history in the making. This claim is most eloquently illustrated by the exhibition Jasenovac—a System of Ustashe Death Camps,12 which was organized in 1994 (April–May) by the Museum of Genocide Victims in collaboration with the Museum of Vojvodina. In the preface, Milan Bulaji´c, the then director of the museum, wrote: The exhibition was prepared for the United Nations, because neither Maks Luburi´c nor Andrija Artukovi´c are registered in the Archive of Concentration Camps and War Crimes in New York as regards the Jasenovac

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death camp. In the Archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva there are twenty or so photographs of the “Potemkin villages,” which represent the Ustashe death camps as labor camps … In disagreements over political solutions for the Yugoslav crisis, in the maps demarcating Croatia, Republika Srpska, and the Republic of Serbian Krajina, the issue of the status of Jasenovac, the Ustashe death camp, must be raised. Jasenovac, the Ustashe death camp, cannot be permitted to be broken up by converting administrative borders into state borders. (Bulaji´c 1994, pp. 1–4)

It is worth mentioning that the exhibition planned in 1994 opened more than twenty years later with a speech given by the minister of foreign affairs, Ivica Daˇci´c (the president of the SPS since 2006, who reformed Miloševi´c’s Socialist Party), at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2018. It had the title Jasenovac—The Right to Remembrance, and this exhibition provoked heated reactions in political circles, with the Croatian prime minister, Andrej Plenkovi´c, sharply calling it a continuation of Serbian propaganda, describing the exhibition as “a special provocation of the politicians behind the aggressions in the former Yugoslavia” (N1 2018). Miloševi´c declared himself the torchbearer of the socialist tradition and of the struggle for the survival of Socialist Yugoslavia (in 1996, during his rule, the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia was founded). However, when he came to power, every form of socialist politics disappeared and then, piece by piece, Yugoslavia did as well. In fact, his politics even opened the door for a historical reevaluation of the Chetnik movement (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 386). This occurred despite the Chetnik discourse having been taken up by the opposition in the 1990s (i.e., by the Serbian Radical Party (Srpska radikalna stranka) and the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski pokret obnove). Indeed, during Miloševi´c’s mandate the center of Belgrade was overflowing with Chetnik paraphernalia, including the šajkaˇca (a Serbian national hat with cockades), iconic pictures of Draža Mihailovi´c, Serbian banners, music cassettes of Chetnik songs, etc. (Gligorijevi´c 2009). However, the formal discourse of the rehabilitation of the Chetnik Movement became the official narrative in museums with Miloševi´c’s fall from power in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Nikoli´c et al. 2002).

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War: Second World War Memorial Museums on the Front Lines Unlike the history museums in Serbia and Croatia, which produced exhibitions during the 1990s wars, either protected or directly influenced by the politics that led to the interethnic conflict,13 a great number of Second World War memorial museums were occupied by the armed forces. The museum collections, archives, and permanent exhibitions were therefore destroyed and often plundered. It is no accident that these museums were used as military bases during the armed conflict. The NOB Museums in Yugoslavia were built on the original sites of the sessions of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Supreme Command, on Partisan hospitals or printing houses, at the sites of Second World War battles and concentration camps, and many of them were located outside the cities, in the mountains, close to republic or state border crossings, and far from any urban area. In the 1990s wars, in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, the front lines often overlapped with those drawn on the Second World War military maps. In the Jasenovac Memorial Museum the cruelest battles over memory were waged. The political instrumentalization of the historical theme of the Jasenovac concentration camp was a tinderbox even from the mid-1980s from which the sparks for the Serbo-Croatian wars were drawn. From 1991 to 1995 the village of Jasenovac was part of the self-declared Serb proto-state—the Republic of Serbian Krajina. At the beginning of the war in Croatia (September 25, 1991), the Jasenovac Memorial Museum collections were stolen and removed by the Yugoslav People’s Army (by then, the Serbian leadership had already taken control of the Yugoslav People’s Army) and Serbian paramilitary units in the Krajina area, who took the collection primarily to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosanska Dubica), and later to the Archive of Republika Srpska (Banja Luka) and then to Serbia (Belgrade).14 Along with the museum collections, all the material from the exhibition Documents of Crimes, which had been installed in the original camp tower as a key part of the Jasenovac Memorial Site, also disappeared in the war drama. After the war, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the Jasenovac Memorial Site sought the return of the stolen museum materials via international institutions. To ensure that the museum collection would be “neutrally” and properly cataloged, the task of conservation and restoration was transferred in 2000 to the Holocaust Museum in

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Washington. Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Republika Srpska at the time, made this decision, with the condition that the museum material should be replicated before sending it to Washington and the replicas would be kept by the museums in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Israel (Krušelj 2001). In December 2001 the museum collections were returned to the Jasenovac Memorial Museum with the help of the Archive of Republika Srpska, mediated by the Stabilization Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.15 Nevertheless, part of the material was lost irretrievably in the war.16 After the successor states had gained their independence, the formerly united Jasenovac Memorial Site was divided into two state and epistemological territories: the Jasenovac Memorial Site in Croatia and the Memorial Site of Donja Gradina in Republika Srpska (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The never-to-be confirmed number of Jasenovac victims remained, from the mid-1980s to the present day, the ever-present political theme related to the “settling of accounts” of the victims. This led to significant conflict and negative diplomatic relations between memorial institutions and historians in Croatia, Serbia, and Republika Srpska. Unlike the postwar Jasenovac Memorial Museum and the Museum of the Victims of Genocide in Serbia, which arrived at a figure of 83,145 victims through a list of names (as a lower threshold, i.e., the minimum confirmed number of victims), the Memorial Site of Donja Gradina has not revised the number of victims mentioned in Yugoslavia (700,000) to this day, insisting on the ethnonational (Serbian) bias to the suffering.17 The minister of education and culture of Republika Srpska, Dane Maleševi´c, in 2015 announced the construction of a museum on the Memorial Site of Donja Gradina.18 The construction of a memorial center has been announced again in 2021, but it has not been built yet.19 The third part of the Jasenovac Memorial Zone “Stara Gradiška” has the most complex history (Smokvina-Mariji´c 2014). It served as a prison for political opponents during the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and then it was an Ustashe concentration camp during the Second World War, before being used as a prison by the Yugoslav authorities. In 1991 “in the hands of Krajina rebels and with the assistance of the Banja Luka Corps of the then Yugoslav National Army it would again become a prisoner-of-war camp.”20 Two memorial plaques have been laid. The first was laid in 2007 by the Croatian Society for the Prisoners of Serbian Concentration Camps in Stara Gradiška in memory of the Croatian defenders, women, and children who were incarcerated in

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this concentration camp in 1991. Meanwhile, the second was laid in 2010 by the government of the Republic of Croatia, who added a plaque in memory of the victims of “all totalitarian regimes” (Negojevi´c and Miliki´c 2012). The Yugoslav Wars (1991–1995) occurred on one more border crossing, from another of the Second World War memorial zones—the Memorial Complex “Battle on Batina.” The memorial house is located on the Croatian side of the Danube River, and it was opened to the public in 1979 as a multipurpose building (a cinema theater, conference hall, and concert hall), and in 1983 an exhibition dedicated to the Battle on Batina was installed. This space was destroyed in the war and nineteen exhibits were stolen,21 mostly weapons and munitions that went missing from the museum exhibition.22 From the Serbian side of the Danube, the Sombor City Museum possessed the inherited collection of the Museum “Battle on Batina” because “in the period from 1991 to 1995 the JNA units were stationed in the former Museum ‘Battle on Batina.’”23 However, the wall installations suffered damage, not from the military units but the passage of time: some works have simply started to rot, wall photographs have faded, and shelves have cracked24 (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1 The Museum “Battle on Batina” before the renovation (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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As with the Jasenovac Memorial Site, the fate of the formerly united Memorial Complex “Battle on Batina” is now divided geographically and administratively, so that today there are two buildings: the Museum “Battle on Batina” in Serbia and the Memorial House “Battle on Batina” in Croatia. On the Croatian side the museum exhibition was opened to visitors in 2001, and on the Serbian side the museum was opened to the public in 2017.25 Unlike the “battle” for the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, which is still ongoing, both the Memorial House “Battle on Batina” and the Museum “Battle on Batina” have exhibitions in which neither the historical narrative nor the museological design from the Yugoslav period has been significantly changed, even though the museum displays in question have been freshly conceptualized. The memory of the joint struggle of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and the Red Army to liberate Yugoslavia from the Wehrmacht, from both sides of the Danube, has thus become a platform for favorable diplomatic relations— a museum where the commemoration ceremonies receive representatives from the Russian embassies. The difference between the wartime period of the Jasenovac museum and that of Batina is that the Jasenovac Memorial Museum was directly targeted as a war trophy, while the Memorial Complex “Battle on Batina” suffered collateral damage on both sides of the Danube due to it being used as an army base. In the war and the postwar political climate (1990–2000) in Croatia, one-third of the NOB monuments and memorial plaques (2,964) were destroyed (Horvatinˇci´c 2017, p. 272; Hrženjak 2002, p. 12). One of the paradigmatic examples of the wave of cleansing the public space of evidence of a shared Yugoslav past is the famous monument to the uprising of the people of Slavonia by Vojin Baki´c, which was shelled in February 1992 by the 123rd Brigade of the Croatian army on several occasions (Mati´c 2007, pp. 110–11). Many Second World War memorial houses in Croatia were demolished during the war to erase any trace of the joint Yugoslav past. Even the musealized war hospitals, whose goal was to embody empathy with the wounded and sick, were destroyed. One of the most radical examples of this type of destruction is the Petrova Gora Memorial Complex (Karaˇci´c 2012, pp. 101–102); sixty objects have disappeared from its cultural and historical collection, seventy-six from its art collection, and an additional ninety-nine objects have been damaged26 (Fig. 4.2). Calling on the testimonies gathered and published by eyewitnesses, Ante Lešaja, an activist who most accurately documented the destruction

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Fig. 4.2 Memorial house at Petrova Gora (Photo 2012 © by Sanja Horvatinˇci´c)

of books during the 1990s in Croatia, lists many of the Second World War memorial houses in Croatia, which were devastated and destroyed during the war (Lešaja 2012, pp. 373–81). The acts of simply throwing museum material all around the museum, and of throwing objects in mud, clearly derided and undervalued the museums, making it impossible for these institutions to function any longer. The authorities, which tolerated vandalism in the postwar period, did not view their role as one of punishing or prosecuting this phenomenon. The still-unrenovated Memorial House “Brotherhood and Unity” at Šamarica illustrates the relationship that the Croatian government had with Second World War memorial museums as symbols of antifascism, especially to the element emphasizing a united Croatian and Serbian struggle in the People’s Liberation War. This memorial area has been left to fall into disrepair; the collection was looted, and the former museum building has become dilapidated. Considering the scope of the 1990s wars, which was undoubtedly larger than in Croatia, the Second World War memorial museums in Bosnia and Herzegovina, almost without exception,27 have suffered irreparable damage. Like the Memorial Complex “Battle on Batina,” a similar scenario unfolded at the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska,” where the army of Republika Srpska was stationed. Works of art, including

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the wall fresco painted by Krsto Hegeduši´c, were considerably damaged. Republika Srpska soldiers carved their names, and the names of various cities, villages, and dates into the walls (Fig. 4.3). In this way two layers of history—i.e., the names of fighters from two wars—became a part of the same museum installation, which was visible until the renovation of the Museum in 2018. The current curator of the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska,” Ðord-e Vukovi´c, claims that “after the war the museum was also destroyed by the local population, as local Muslims laid many minefields in the memorial zone during the war, and even today the curators have problems moving around it.”28 Besides the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska,” the Sutjeska Memorial Park also housed a history museum, which was completely destroyed during the war, with its exhibits blown to pieces. A relief on a 1:100,000 scale, which displays the Battle on Sutjeska across the entire territory on which it played out, was, in the words of the curator, Ðord-e Vukovi´c, taken away after 1995 by international forces.29

Fig. 4.3 Fresco painting by Krsto Hegeduši´c damaged by unknown perpetrators. Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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The Museum of the First Session of AVNOJ was also directly targeted by artillery and half its exhibits were taken.30 The Museum “25 May 1944” in Drvar shared the same fate (Plešnik 2010, p. 147). The three museum buildings were annihilated, and the famous Tito’s Cave was set on fire. Many works of art, exhibits, and three-dimensional objects were stolen.31 The whirlwind of war reduced the interior of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session and the Museum of ZAVNOBiH—symbols of Bosnian and Herzegovinian and Yugoslav statehood—to dust. The Museum of the Second Session of AVNOJ went up in flames. Parts of the building were set on fire, the entire structure was significantly damaged, and three-quarters of the museum collection was destroyed.32 According to the son of Dušan Gaši´c, the prewar owner of the building in which the First Session of the ZAVNOBiH was held, and in which the museum was later inaugurated, when he entered the (former) museum after the Bosnian War, he found the following scene: Every bust had been shot in the mouth or eyes. We found smashed busts, too. Everything had been demolished, glass smashed. The carpets had all been torn and thrown about. It was chaos. There had been paintings on the walls by artists who had been fighters in the NOB. I don’t know who did this, or what had been done with them, but the paintings were not there anymore. Nothing remained as it was. (Klix.ba 2014)

Nevertheless, the crudest violation of the Hague Convention (for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict from 1954) during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the change in status of the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” into a refugee center. ´ According to Camil Cero, the prewar and postwar curator of the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva,” when the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina started, the prewar director of the museum informed the employees that soldiers and refugees would be hosted in the museum.33 He further added: The museum stopped working in the war of 1992–1995. The exhibition was destroyed, devastated, plundered. Bosniak and Croat refugees were put in the museum; even though on the internet it was claimed that only Croatians were put there. This wasn’t in any way a concentration camp for Croatians, as some Croatians like to say. No, this place was a collective reception center in which there were Bosniak and Croatian refugees and soldiers, and the armies of the republic of BiH and the HVO [Croatian

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Defense Council]. 95% of the museum was converted into a place for the army and I worked there. The museum roof was leaking, so the documents also rotted.34

There is hardly any documentation on military interventions in the many other museums through which the armies marched during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and this is for two reasons: either the museums were renovated, and one can only find out about their condition in the war from verbal testimonies,35 or the museums in question have remained locked and abandoned to further decay or desecration by vandals. The only museum that worked in the difficult war circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina was the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The museum employees in the museum tried to take care, as much as the conditions allowed, of the collections, while also considering the museum’s future. Dušan Otaševi´c, the biggest expert on the musealization of the Second World War and a long-term employee of the Museum of the Revolution of BiH, made a conceptual sketch of the content in 1993 (during the war) for the museum journal, Zbornik, which ˇ was published twenty-seven years later (Custo et al. 2017, pp. 8–9). In the words of the current curator Elma Hodži´c: At the beginning of the siege of the city the exhibits were transferred to the museum’s storage rooms. Part of the workforce was bound by duty to work and looked after the exhibits and museum every day. The other part of the workforce had been mobilized. During and after the war, the museum did not fulfill its primary function; its exhibiting function stagnated because it was in too precarious a position to organize public gatherings in a building that was on the front line.36

Thanks to the Zagreb museological magazine Informatica museologica, which was also published in the wartime period, a record of the state of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina remains (Fig. 4.4): Despite the difficult working conditions – exposure to constant shelling and sniper fire – the courageous museum workers managed to protect the museum building, assess and record the damage, and notify their parent institutions. The permanent museum exhibit was dismantled, classified, and along with the other museum material, stored in a secure place.

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Fig. 4.4 The building of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 (Reproduced with permission of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo © History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Damage Because of the violent and consecutive attacks on the city by the heavy artillery and snipers of the alleged Yugoslav People’s Army, as well as from Serbian paramilitary formations, cultural structures and monuments have been seriously damaged. The Museum of the Revolution of BiH, otherwise known as the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, could not avoid this fate and suffered considerable material damage. Twenty-four shells hit the museum and its surroundings (the atrium and courtyard). The sewage system was destroyed, which led to excessive damp, and the parquet floor peeled off. In several places water was leaking through the roof. Almost all the working spaces are riddled with sniper shots. The walls, vitrines, and tables are damaged. One single strike penetrated the reinforced wall of the hall where the permanent exhibition is located. This strike caused damage to several exhibits. The completely unusable museum spaces include: the museum hall used for thematic exhibitions, the museum club, the room housing the museum documentation center collection (this room has sustained lighter damage) and the café. The collection of artworks have sustained lighter damage, while a small number of oil paintings of very significant value have suffered damage from shelling. The museum atrium, courtyard, and terrace are full of holes. The marble tiles

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that covered the museum are split and fragmented. A tank exhibit from the Second World War has been hit. (Bejdi´c 1992, p. 91)

Considering that the 1991–1995 wars did not occur on Serbia’s territory, apart from the abovementioned Museum “Battle on Batina” and the Museum of the Srem Front, which was damaged in 1992–1993 (Suboti´c et al. 2004, p. 8; Vajagi´c 2017, p. 429), there are no other examples of Second World War memorial museums that were used for military purposes. However, this was a period when some of these museums, which were located close to border crossings, moved their collections to safer spaces as a precaution. The curator of the Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca,” Slavica Stefanovi´c, testified to this: “Twice we removed the exhibits: in the time of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and during the NATO bombing.”37 The ambivalence of Miloševi´c’s politics to Yugoslav heritage is clear from the condition the Second World War memorial museums were in at that time. Officially, they were operating, but in fact their budget had been reduced to only paying the employees, and so the buildings lacked a financial plan and slowly fell into ruin.38 We must also ask if the devastation of the People’s Liberation Struggle memorial museums was a planned objective. Was it part of the wartime inertia, or even revenge by those whose voices had been silenced in the Yugoslav museums? The evidence reviewed here seems to suggest that unlike the destruction of religious buildings, which was systematic, the Second World War memorial museums in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia suffered enormous damage not from being demolished on military orders (there is to my knowledge no evidence of such orders: the only exception may be the Jasenovac Memorial Museum), but rather on the whim of individuals, so that we might more precisely characterize their disappearance as collateral damage. In this vein, the historian Amer Sulejmanagi´c has claimed that the devastation of the Vraca Memorial Complex during the war did not occur for ideological reasons but rather because Vraca served as a base for the siege of the city and for artillery and snipers (Sulejmanagi´c 2017, p. 83) due to its strategic position with a clear view of the city of Sarajevo. However, it can also be claimed that even the occupation of the museums by the army was an indirect act of destroying heritage. To a large extent the demolition of the NOB memorial sites was a combination of tolerating and instigating the destruction of heritage enacted by the dominant currents of all the warring factions, and so it was possibly

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also an act motivated by the desire to erase the epistemological and political space for deliberating over (and acting on) the heritage of the Second World War as it had been collected, constructed, walked, retold, and remembered in Yugoslavia (Jagdhuhn 2016, p. 11). The devastation of the legacy of the Second World War in the postwar period, as well as the authorities’ negligence in restoring the destroyed cultural heritage, can be interpreted, according to the art historian Marija Jaukovi´c (2014), either as the successor states wishing to politically distance themselves from an “inconvenient past,” or as the responsible institutions’ inability to respond to the current situation (Fig. 4.5).

Fig. 4.5 The map of the Second World War memorial museums and memorial houses that were damaged or destroyed during the 1991–1995 wars or immediately after the wars (i.e., in 1995–2000) (Map © Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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Croatia: 1. Jasenovac Memorial Museum 2. Memorial House on Batina 3. Memorial House at Petrova Gora 4. Memorial House on Šamarica 5. Memorial House in Glina 6. Memorial House in Brestik 7. Memorial House in Ljeskovac 8. Memorial House in Komogovina 9. Memorial House in Svinica 10. Memorial House in Brlog 11. Memorial House in Konˇcarevo 12. Memorial House in Otoˇcac 13. Memorial House on Plitice 14. Memorial House in Trnovac 15. Memorial House in Srb Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1. Memorial House on Tjentište 2. Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session 3. Museum of the First ZAVNOBiH Session 4. Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” 5. Museum “25 May 1944” 6. Museum of the First AVNOJ Session Serbia: 1. Museum “Battle on Batina” 2. Museum of the Srem Front (It is highly likely that there were Second World War memorial museums and memorial houses that have not been listed here in villages or hamlets). Such “heritocide” (Sjekavica 2012), bid farewell to the traces of the (concept of) “people’s culture.” Considering the (force of) the wave of violence that broke (out) over this cultural heritage—with a ferocity unprecedented since the Second World War—numerous authors have

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tried to name the conceptual apparatuses at stake, so that the violent act of erasing any traces of the existence of an ethnic or religious community, as well as all signs of the former multiethnic federal state, may be interpreted and described as “mnemocide,” (Assmann 2016), “memoricide” (Haraˇci´c 2012), “urbicide” (Bogdanovi´c 1993), or “literocide” (Lešaja 2012). Although the former Yugoslavia was among the first states to ratify the Hague convention (Bauer 1968, p. 7), and the military plan for the protection of the NOB collections was thoroughly prepared (Polšak 1965, pp. 48–63), the degree of devastation of the cultural, historical, and natural heritage in the 1990s wars, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina “where the survival of the entire heritage was put into question,” (Izvještaj o devastaciji kulturno-historijskog i prirodnog naslijed-a (1992–1995)39 showed that the legal basis for the Hague convention was pitilessly violated.40 Also, during the war on the territory of Croatia “an absolute disrespect for the international convention for the protection of mobile and immobile cultural heritage and the absolute unfeasibility of the application of the Hague convention is evident” (Šulc 1992a, p. 46), regardless of the numerous appeals made to the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the World Monument Fund, and ICOM by Croatian museologists (Skoko 2021, p. 21).

Ethnonationalization: (B)ordering Second World War Memories The state succession of the cultural property after the breakup of Yugoslavia is a process that has not yet ended, and the alienation and destruction of private and public property during the wars of the 1990s made this process particularly difficult.41 Nevertheless, in 2001 the Yugoslav Agreement on Succession Issues was signed by representatives of all successor states. With this agreement, the states reached the commitment that each successor state acknowledges the principle that it must always take necessary measures to prevent loss, damage, or destruction of state archives, state property, and assets of the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in which, in line with the provisions of this agreement, one or more of the other successor states have an interest. (Yugoslav Agreement on Succession Issues [online] United Nations Treaty Collections 2001)

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Correspondingly, and of particular importance for research into the transformation of the museum landscape after the breakup of Yugoslavia, in Annex 2, Article 2 of this agreement, a law was formulated that determines ownership over cultural goods and museums. It stated: “Immovable state property of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) that was located within the territory of the SFRJ shall pass to the successor state on whose territory that property is situated.”42 Thus, the former NOB Museums created in the name and context of Yugoslavia became part of the territorial nation-state reference frames, first in legal terms and then in terms of curatorial methods. As in 1945, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, not only were the collections but also the principal conceptual approaches of museum institutions redefined. This was manifest in selective memory regarding past political epochs upon which new (museums as) borders (Gavrilovi´c 2011) of memory were constructed. Selection is a keyword in the curatorial profession. Choice is an act that not only introduces an object to history, i.e., transforms it into heritage, but through the process of musealization an object becomes an identity-making source in “our” authentic, national fabric: culture. The separation process that differentiates between suitable and unsuitable historical episodes leads to the forming of a value “surplus.” This happens for those memorial institutions whose art and ethnographic values exceed the scope of their historical importance. The most explicit examples are the Art Gallery of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” in Titograd (now the Contemporary Art Centre of Montenegro in Podgorica) and the Museum “25 May” (a collection of gifts to Tito, which is now part of the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade). These two museum collections (former museums) have not yet found their own new cultural frame of reference, even though they are part of operating museum institutions. A case in point is the collection of artworks of fifty-seven donor states at the Art Gallery of the Non-Aligned Countries, which was an idea born at the Seventh Summit Conference of Heads of State of the Government of the Non-Aligned Movement (hereinafter: NAM) in New Delhi in 1982. At this meeting, NAM Summit participants gave their full support to forming a joint art institution. This was not merely forcefully removed from the Yugoslav state context due to its annulment; rather, it lost its much wider epistemological and political framework that included ideas promoting the decolonization and deimperialization of the museum field, which it was supposed to serve.

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Besides heritage that has become irrelevant because of changes in the historical and political context after the disappearance of Socialist Yugoslav politics, there are numerous examples of heritage having been invented because of the absence of that context. These are objects that did not end up in museum showcases but were state objects that became successor state property and were used for commercial purposes. The most wellknown examples of such rebranded heritage include Tito’s famous Blue Train, occasionally used in diplomacy and the Galeb yacht on which Tito traveled to and from (North and West) African countries in promoting the idea of the NAM. Due to the aforementioned agreement, these objects became the property of the successor state on whose territory those objects were located when Yugoslavia dissolved. There was no debate over their historical importance or material value, which belongs to all the Yugoslav successor states. These items include the collection of Tito’s luxurious automobiles or numerous works of art, especially those found in the pavilions of the former Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia building (now the Palace of Serbia). The same was true of the Second World War memorial museums: the formerly shared heritage was simply dispersed across state borders, sometimes, if necessary, even split (e.g., the memorial areas in Jasenovac and Batina). Thus, by simply existing within new political formations, such heritage became both somebody’s and nobody’s. The “whose heritage?” problem (B˘adescu et al. 2021, p. 5), despite being somewhat resolved through the agreement, requires further deliberation. For instance, Second World War heritage could first be mapped, and then the different actors and groups thanks to which certain Second World War memorial museums have been restored and repurposed after the fall of Yugoslavia could be outlined. Given that “heritage inevitably reflects the governing assumptions of its time and context” (Hall 2005, p. 26), the following question arises: which museums are perceived to be of value for furthering a national history in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia? A map of the Second World War memorial museums, houses, and exhibitions in the successor states of Yugoslavia has been created to help the reader to visualize the spatial relationships between Second World War memorial museums after the breakup of Yugoslavia (Fig. 4.6). A spatial analysis and visual representation of the memorial landscapes of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia clearly show which and how Second World War memorial museums were restored after the

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Fig. 4.6 Map of the Second World War memorial museums, houses, and exhibitions in the successor states of Yugoslavia (Map © Nataša Jagdhuhn)

breakup of Yugoslavia. Further analysis of the post-Yugoslav situation will uncover the strategies used for claiming responsibility and negotiations between the antifascist organizations that inherited the Yugoslav SUBNOR and their local political representatives. This is because the Second World War memorial museums came to be governed by the municipalities on whose territories they are located.

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Croatia The Museum Documentary Center created a detailed inventory and carried out an exhaustive evaluation of wartime damage to museums on three occasions (Ukrainˇcik 2001). The results of the first study were published in 1997 with the title, “War Damage to Museums and Galleries in Croatia” (Šulc et al. 1997). A supplementary edition was published in 1999 electronically (both projects were financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia). Thanks to support from the National Committee of UNESCO in 2001, an internet search engine43 was developed that, besides giving information about the damaged material, also documented it as photographs (Zgaga 2004). Although there are many reports and essays by museum experts on the demolition of cultural heritage during the war in Croatia (Šulc 1991, pp. 5–19; Frlan 1992, p. 147; Pirnat-Spahi´c 1992, p. 90; Šulc 1992b, pp. 41–45; Prott 1992, pp. 24–25; Frlan 1993, pp. 45–47; Zgaga 1993, pp. 36–39; Šulc 1993, pp. 6–8; Pavi´c 1996, p. 126; Metež et al. 1991, pp. 45–81; Bejdi´c 1992, p. 91), the condition of the numerous NOB memorial houses has still not been documented by the MDC.44 Individuals and numerous antifascist associations have carried out this work on a voluntary basis and have drawn up inventories describing the condition of the destroyed heritage.45 The legal successor of the Yugoslav Alliance of the Association of Fighters of the People’s Liberation War of Croatia is today’s Alliance of Antifascist Fighters of the Republic of Croatia (Savez antifašistiˇckih boraca i antifašista Republike Hrvatske, SAB RH), which is a nongovernmental organization. Since the 1990s, this alliance has been exposed to political pressure in the form of “countless disdainful, untrue and intolerant incriminations, the persecution of organizations from modest spaces, the chastising of members and leaders, and in many places the forceful prohibition of activity.”46 Despite the unfavorable political climate after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the alliance’s various local branches have participated in the reconstruction of Second World War memorial museums. The former museum, the Museum “Lipa Remembers,”47 was completely renovated on the initiative of the Alliance of Antifascists of Liburnia, the Matulji municipality, and inhabitants of the village of Lipa. After the antifascists visited the Lidica Memorial in Czechia (a village that suffered the same fate as Lipa during the Second World War), in 2012

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they decided to start an initiative related to the abandoned and closed museum.48 Besides the Matulji municipality, the renovation project was also aided by Primorje-Gorski Kotar County and then, albeit modestly, by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. The Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers” opened in 2015 as a subsidiary collection of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral (Rijeka). It was decided that the permanent exhibition’s new concept should refer to its predecessor from 1989 (Perinˇci´c 2013). To make this curatorial strategy clear to the visitors, a model of the museum’s interior as it looked during Yugoslavia was placed at the museum’s entrance. The voice of Danica Maljevi´c, the curator, who worked in this museum until the breakup of Yugoslavia, forms part of the audio installations in the new museum exhibit. Also, the Memorial Room “Museum of Victory” in Šibenik (2016) was a project completely financed by the Šibenik-Knin District Association of Antifascists (Pavlakovi´c 2021, p. 105). This is the only museum exhibition dedicated to the Partisan resistance in postsocialist Croatia, and it is the only newly opened Second World War memorial institution in Croatia. However, it still did not acquire official museum status, which is why “in response to its lack of recognition, its founders dubbed it a ‘museum’” (Jagdhuhn 2021, p. 305). The Memorial House “NOB in Punat”49 on the island of Krk is an example of a “time capsule” displaying the Yugoslav exhibition. It can be seen only on Museum Night (an annual event in Croatia where museums open to the public at night) when it is opened by the Association of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists of the island of Krk. Transplanting Yugoslav heritage within the national framework is additionally complicated by the multinational origins of Second World War heritage. Their disentanglement, especially the eradication of such heritage’s “foreign” origin, leads to the irreversible loss of museological material and thus also public memory, which is especially the case when considering execution sites. Regardless of the extent to which Yugoslavia nurtured a “regime museology” (i.e., to which it viewed museums as apparatuses of state ideology whose cohesive power of unification through the narrative of shared Second World War antifascist struggle was also their primary role), the crimes of the Ustashe were musealized, even if their national aspect was not stressed.

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In the Republic of Croatia, numerous memorial areas that figured as a “stain” in the country’s national history, have disappeared. The Memorial House of the Oborovo Battle—in which the Partisans fought the Ustashe forces together with the Germans—has been removed (Novak and Bosanac 2001, p. 387). The only item left is the memorial ossuary that the antifascist associations hold commemorations in front of. Even the former memorial house (i.e., the collection) in the building where the inmates of the Danica concentration camp were held has been removed and the historic building is currently being used as storage space for the ethnographic department at the Museum of the City of Koprivnica.50 The most extreme case of historical erasure occurred at the Memorial House of the Victims of Ustashe Terror in Glina (the historic site where 1,564 Serbs were killed by the Ustashe in 1941), which has not only been closed down but was reopened and renamed the Croatian Hall (Hrvatski dom) in 1995 (Karaˇci´c 2012, p. 101). This is an issue common to memorial areas of great importance for Serbs’ commemorations of historic events in areas that have now become part of the Republic of Croatia’s territory. They thus belong to the “orphan heritage” (Rampley 2012, p. 11) category. The only independent memorial museum dedicated to the Second World War in Croatia is the Jasenovac Memorial Museum (2006). The coauthor of the new exhibition is Nataša Matauši´c. She is also the author of the permanent exhibition of the Memorial House “Battle on Batina” (2011), one of two renovated memorial houses in Croatia, the other being the Memorial House “Ivan Goran Kovaˇci´c” (2003). Unlike the curatorial concept of the Europeanization of the Holocaust, which Matauši´c implemented in the Jasenovac museum (see Chapter 6 for a detailed analysis), the exhibition concept in Batina, as earlier mentioned, remained both museographically and museologically consistent with the concept from the Yugoslav period. In addition, Matauši´c (1995) called for the renovation of Tito’s Cave on the island of Vis in Croatia, the virtual museum of Dotršˇcina (Brkovi´c and Vraneševi´c 2012) as a collaborative initiative, and she suggested building the Museum of the Resistance (Matauši´c 2008) in Croatia. These initiatives failed to result in the construction of new museum buildings. According to the last index of museums,51 drawn up in late 1988 by the Museum Documentation Center, the Socialist Republic of Croatia had six memorial-museum exhibitions and collections under the umbrella of the central Museum of the Revolution of the Croatian People.52 There

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were four independent memorial museums, which formed a core part of the memorial zones (the memorial monuments and memorial museums) in Croatia during Yugoslavia. Two of them have since been devastated and abandoned (the Petrova Gora and Šamarica memorial parks), while the other two, after falling into disrepair during the recent war in Croatia, had their museum displays renewed (the Jasenovac Memorial Site and the Kumrovec Memorial Park).53 The Memorial House “The People’s Liberation Movement on the island of Iž” has been part of the contemporary history collections at the Zadar City Museum since the breakup of Yugoslavia (it is registered under the title Regional Cultural and Historical Collection “Mali Iž”).54 Bosnia and Herzegovina The Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina was established on the basis of Annex 8 of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Decision on the Commission to Preserve National Monuments, which was passed by the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 119 session, held on December 21, 2001.55 Although the commission does not have executive powers, it contributed to the restoration of the Second World War memorial museums by returning the status of cultural heritage to the former NOB Museums after their demolition during the 1992–1995 war. The commission’s recognition of these museums as cultural heritage of national importance has given antifascist associations and engaged individuals (mainly the curators of former NOB Museums) the legitimacy to launch their own restoration projects. The former SUBNOR BiH split into two parts, one belonging to Republika Srpska called the Association of Fighters of the People’s Liberation War of Republika, which formed in 1992, and the other belonging to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the League of Antifascists and Fighters of the People’s Liberation War in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which formed in 2006. The SUBNOR successor active in Republika Srpska collaborates closely with the SUBNOR association active in Serbia. In both Serbia and Republika Srpska, the respective SUBNOR representatives commemorate the Battle on Sutjeska and the Battle on Kozara (all territorially within Republika Srpska) alongside representatives of the government of the Republic of Serbia and Republika Srpska. Because of this division, double commemorations take place

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on different dates, so that representatives of the respective SUBNOR associations from the federation and from Republika Srpska (and Serbia) can each organize their own programs. The dismembering of the former Yugoslav SUBNOR was accompanied by nationalist frictions between these two members of a once-united organization. However, these new antifascist organizations, alongside the curators of the former NOB Museums, are of crucial importance for the postwar museum-restoration process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The most obvious example of a “bottom-up” initiative is the establishment of the Board for the Renewal of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session (2004), which was organized by representatives of SUBNOR, the antifascist organizations of all the former Yugoslav republics, and Jajce’s nongovernmental sector (the Society for the Preservation of CulturalHistorical and Natural Values, the Association “Josip Broz Tito,” and the Alliance of Antifascists and Fighters of the People’s Liberation War of Bosnia and Herzegovina). In practice, individuals assumed the role of the state, collected funds, gathered experts, and established NGOs. (Jagdhuhn 2016, p.111). As the ethnologist Dragan Nikoli´c learned in his interview with some of the actors, individuals took on the role of heritage revival independently because it was “a matter of honor” (Nikoli´c 2013 p. 24). Also, he cites one of the most prominent activists for the renewal of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, the Jajce-born, Bosnian and Herzegovinian historian Dubravko Lovrenovi´c, who described his role: Life cannot be brought to a standstill simply because we do not have a state-level Ministry of Culture. Therefore, we cannot wait for someone to give us a Ministry of Culture, we must work and in some way be guerrilla fighters. Fight a guerrilla war. You aim to be somebody who is recognized as relevant in the world (UNESCO), and you do not have a basic system that can defend this, i.e., defend this cultural good.56

The new permanent exhibition of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session (2008) was also conceived by Nataša Matauši´c (with assistance from representatives of all the antifascist associations in the former Yugoslav region). Her expertise in museum renovation, in relation to both this example and that of museums in Croatia, was based on her many years of work at the Museum of the Revolution of the Peoples of Croatia (today known as the Croatian History Museum).

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In a similar way, the former curators of the NOB Museums did not accept the postwar situation regarding these collections. The museums in Drvar and Jablanica (two municipalities that belong to the Federation of BiH entity; in Drvar the majority of the population are Serbs and in Jablanica the majority are Bosniaks) are telling examples of the cura´ tors’ engagement there: Camil Cero, the long-standing current curator at the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” in Jablanica and the retired curator Drago Trnini´c, who worked at the Museum of the Drvar Desant (Museum “25th May 1944”) before the war, both collected renovation funds for the above museums. They designed the concepts underpinning the new postwar displays and in both examples the institutions have been reconstructed in a way that perpetuates the message from Yugoslav times. As Drago Trnini´c said, “This love for museum work and for the town dictated that I, from an expert position, therefore did everything I could to help that museum rise from the ashes.”57 He was able to collect financial aid for the renovation from the mayor of the municipality at the time (Anka Papak-Dodig from the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats/Savez Nezavisnih Socijaldemokrata) and the United States Agency for International Development. The museum reopened in 2007.58 Unlike the museum in Drvar, the authorities at the time in Jablanica, as Cero states, “did not want the Museum ‘Battle for the Wounded on Neretva’ to remain an NOB Museum.”59 In 1997, the museum’s status changed: it became an independent institution, but with a different function and a different name—the Museum of Northern Herzegovina. Thus, the museum was supposed to become a regional museum (regionalni muzej ). In 2002, Cero started collecting data from the Historical Museum of BiH in Sarajevo (in Yugoslavia this museum was an annex to the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. He looked at encyclopedias for reference and consulted the thematic plans of the Yugoslav exhibition display and thus finally created a conceptual outline of the new exhibition display for the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” (2013).60 Besides the new permanent exhibition, which is reminiscent of its predecessor from the Yugoslav period, the new museum has two additional exhibi´ tions (both also designed by Camil Cero): an ethnographic exhibition dedicated to the traditions of the Jablanica region, and an exhibition dedicated to the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Plešnik 2010, p. 237).

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The curator Davor Midži´c, of the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session in Biha´c, has claimed that the museum is also being “blackmailed” by the local authorities: “You will receive money for renovation, but in return this is where all cultural events, concerts and of course the promotion of political parties, preelection gatherings, etc. will take place.”61 As with the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva,” the condition set by local politicians for their funding of the renovation of the museum in Biha´c was to rename and reclassify the former NOB Museum. After the end of the war, the Museum of the First Session of AVNOJ merged with the Regional Museum of Pounja into a new museum complex called the Museum of the Una-Sana Canton. This act resulted in the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session being renamed as the Permanent Display of the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session. The reconstruction of the exhibition dedicated to the First AVNOJ Session was approved in 2003–2004 thanks to the joint efforts of the Federal Ministry of Culture and Sport, the USK Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport, the municipality of Biha´c, the Federal Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, and the Museum of the Una-Sana Canton. This project was coordinated by Robert Stergar from the Federal Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.62 The new exhibition provides a historical overview of the political meeting held on November 26 and 27, 1942, in the spirit of the “Yugoslav museological school.” The historic stage that was once part of the permanent exhibition has been removed. The current museum director, Nijazija Maslak, has been the curator of the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session since Yugoslav times. All these museums lie on the territory of the BiH Federation entity and, as can be concluded from the data provided, their renovation started in the first half of the year 2000 and was implemented on the initiative of former employees and antifascist organizations, and with financial help from the municipality, which means that their continued operation depends on the local political will. On the territory of Republika Srpska, municipal politics also determine the museums’ continued existence. Thus, the Museum “the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle” was repurposed and renamed as the Museum of Old Herzegovina in 1998. Like the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva,” an ethnographic exhibition and an exhibition dedicated to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (see Chapter 6 for a detailed analysis) have been installed alongside the exhibition dedicated to the Second World War (the

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Yugoslav version is still intact here) in the museum in Foˇca. The Jablanica and Foˇca museums are paradigmatic examples of the “transition” in which museums in both BiH entities are “stuck.” The paradigm of perceiving the history of the Second World War through the lens of the 1992–1995 wars was also applied to the reconstruction of the Museum “First Proletarian Brigade” in Rudo, which now functions as a memorial exhibition (without a hired curator) (Bilbija 2016). Another museum that has passed through this same transitional pattern is the Mrakovica Museum. In 1998, the exhibition named Kozara during the Antifascist Struggle was removed and an exhibition named Genocide against the Serbs in the Twentieth Century was added (the exhibition concept was developed by Rastislav Petrovi´c) to the museum. This “temporary” exhibition remained in place until mid-2012 when the museum’s reconstruction was completed with financial aid from the Republika Srpska government. Today’s permanent exhibition (2012), despite still being called Kozara in the People’s Liberation Struggle and attempting to convey the same material as its Yugoslav predecessor, now accentuates the suffering of Serbs in the Kozara region during the Second World War (Šahovi´c and Zulumovi´c 2015). The entire memorial area surrounding the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska” has been defined as a cultural good of exceptional importance (based on a decision made by the national parliament in 2009) (Vukovi´c and Pavlovi´c 2017, p. 36). Because of the vast war devastation, it took more than two decades to be reconstructed (in 2018). Interestingly, during these two decades it was possible (with advance notice) to visit the ruined museum exhibition.63 The Museum “Podgrmeˇc—the People’s Liberation Struggle in Jasenica” (Deraji´c 2010) and many other museum collections64 and memorial houses65 that were devastated and abandoned during the Bosnian War, were never renovated. The Memorial House “First ZAVNOBiH Session” in Mrkonji´c Grad, which was a symbol of Bosnian and Herzegovinian identity in Yugoslavia, has been declared a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Commission for the Maintenance of the National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2002), but it has not been rebuilt despite this (Karovi´c 2019). The Second World War memorial parks—even three decades after the breakup of Yugoslavia—are still the target of a nationalist reckoning with Yugoslavia’s past.

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One characteristic example of the continued devastation of national ˇ 2008), which is now located in goods is the Vraca Memorial Park (Custo the municipality of Novo Sarajevo (the Federation of BiH), on the border with the municipality of East Novo Sarajevo (in Republika Srpska). It is a memorial site that was erected (1981) to honor Sarajevo’s Second World War victims (of which there were more than 12,000) regardless of their nationality. It was destroyed by the withdrawal of the Army of Republika Srpska in 1996. In 2005 it was declared a national monument. Amra ˇ Custo, from the Cantonal Institute for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the following when speaking about the Vraca Memorial Park: From 2008 there is a phased program of rebuilding the Vraca memorial complex. The Cantonal Institute for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Monuments, as an institution that deals with the protection of the memorial complex, is confronted on the ground with the problem that one day the place is rebuilt and then already by the next it has been destroyed – devastated again.66

Serbia The Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Serbia’s register of historical sites linked to the People’s Liberation Struggle and the People’s Revolution is the best organized lists of memorial institutions and areas placed under the protection of the state.67 This list is part of a web program called the Information System of Immovable Cultural Property, which has been available to researchers since 2018. This project, although incomplete, forms the basis for the potential restoration of neglected memorials (Koprivica 2008). The last federal form of SUBNOR organization (named SUBNOR of Yugoslavia) existed until 2006 as an association in Serbia and Montenegro. Logically, this also changed form and name with Montenegro’s declaration of independence. When in 1992 SUBNOR of Serbia welcomed fighters to its ranks, as stated in their statute, “who as members of the SFRJ armed forces took part in armed actions against the disintegration of Yugoslavia from 1990 to May 20, 1992”68 and then also “participants in the defense against the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) aggression on Serbia in 1999,”69 numerous members of the former Yugoslav and later Serbian SUBNOR left the organization not wanting

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to share the same membership with fighters from the 1990s wars who for the most part declared themselves to be “Chetniks,” and because of disagreements regarding Slobodan Miloševi´c’s politics, which the Serbian SUBNOR supported. Two new organizations were therefore created: the Associations for the Truth about the People’s Liberation Struggle and Yugoslavia, and the Alliance of the Antifascists of Serbia. These two associations directed their main activities to the fight against the rehabilitation of the Chetnik Movement and all other fascist collaborators linked to the Second World War, which implies an enduring fight to abolish the legally unfounded laws that have facilitated this process, as well as the fight against the justification of crimes committed in the 1990s Yugoslav wars, and the protection of their protagonists. In other words, their activities are directed toward criticizing SUBNOR’s turn in their politics of Second World War remembrance in Serbia. As the Antifascists of Serbia depend on project financing via international funds (the Open Society Foundation, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, etc.), the scope of their activities has narrowed and is therefore insufficient to influence changes to the functioning of Second World War memorial museums. However, SUBNOR of Serbia, which is financed by the state, has not advocated to date (at least to the extent that it would be considered a public campaign) or influenced the restoration of abandoned museums related to the Second World War. Also, it has not revolted against the closing down of the Museum of the Party’s Illegal Printing Offices, the Memorial House “4 July,” and the Museum Complex “Military Counsel in Stolice,” which were abandoned around the year 2000 (Vasiljevi´c 2014, pp. 136–137). For two decades SUBNOR of Serbia has organized the commemoration of important dates in Second World War history in front of the demolished museums. Examples include the celebration in front of the Museum “7 July”70 or the commemoration in front of the Museum “Battle on Batina,” which was left in ruins until 2017 when it was renovated, and its previous purpose was reinstated. Although most of the Second World War memorial museums built in the Yugoslav period are still operating (the Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac, the Museum “Srem Front,” and the museum exhibition on the 1941 Uprising as part of the National Museum in Užice, the Museum “12 February” as a branch of the National Museum in Niš, the Museum “Battle on Batina” as a department in the City Museum of Sombor, the

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Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp” in Belgrade as a space under the remit of the City Museum of Belgrade). Several of these museums still need to resolve their legal status, which is why they remain closed to the public (the Museum “7 July,” the entire Museum complex “Military Counsel in Stolice”71 and the Museum of the Pioneer and Youth Movements of Yugoslavia).72 In the new exhibitions of the museums in Kragujevac (2003), Užice (2016), Niš (2013), and Belgrade (2001), the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland was given the status of an antifascist movement, while this is not the case with the new exhibition display in the Museum “Battle of Batina” (2017). Many of the memorial houses dedicated to the Second World War have been closed down. There are very few examples of memorial exhibitions or houses that still operate. One example is the memorial exhibition Partisan Base in Vrbas, which has been restored by the staff working on the museum collections of the Cultural Center of Vrbas (Koprivica 2008). Another example is the Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca,” whose exhibition on the Second World War has not been changed since the breakup of Yugoslavia, but the museum has added an exhibition dedicated to the NATO bombing (this opened in 1999). A third example ˇ is the Memorial House “Janko Cmelik” in Stara Pazova, which has an intact exhibition from the Yugoslav period (it is under the jurisdiction of the Stara Pazova Center for Culture). There are likely more examples of similar memorial exhibitions or houses in Serbia that are smaller in scope, and that operate as part of local cultural centers. ˇ The only new development is that in 2013 in Curug, the Museum 73 ˇ “Victims of the Curug Raid” opened; this memorial house did not exist in Yugoslavia. Also, in 2000 the memorial houses dedicated to the history of the Ravna Gora Movement during the Second World War and especially to its leader, Dragoljub Draža Mihailovi´c was opened.74 It was unveiled with support from the Serbian Renewal Movement Party (Srpski Pokret Obnove) (Ðureinovi´c 2020, p. 62). Despite the Serbian parliament adopting amendments in 2004 that gave equal rights to the veterans of the Chetnik and the Partisan movements and placed the Ravna Gora Commemorative Medal on an equal footing with the Commemorative Medal of the Partisans (Ðureinovi´c 2020, pp.131–132), the state has never officially shown support for the new Ravna Gora project, neither financially nor symbolically (by supporting celebrations, commemorations, etc.). Therefore, this memorial house does not have the status of

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a museum. It is an exhibition space built on a private initiative without employed curators. Paradoxically enough, socialist heritage in Serbia has even become ˇ cak a commercial object. The Museum of Revolutionary Youth in Caˇ was sold to a local businessman (Markovi´c 2006). Also, the Memorial Complex “Boško Buha,” founded in 1974, (consisting of the Memorial House “Boško Buha” along with a hotel of 450 beds, monuments, and land) was donated by the council of Prijepolje in 1986 to Putnik (the biggest Yugoslav travel agency at that time), although this memorial was built with funds collected from Pioneer movements across the whole of Yugoslavia. Since then, Putnik has tried to sell the memorial complex several times; the last attempt was in 2022, and it was halted only three days before the auction (January 28) because of an appeal made by the Society of Conservators of Serbia and expert publics.75 The National Museum in Prijepolje, as the director Slavoljub Pušica claims,76 only owns the building of the Museum of Pioneers and Youth of Yugoslavia (the authentic exhibition created in 1964 can still be seen in its original state). The Museum of the Party’s Illegal Printing Offices and the Museum “4 July” (both branches of the City Museum of Belgrade) were returned— following a court decision—to the family who owned the houses before the Second World War. Despite these buildings being on the list of national monuments, a national asset became a privately owned building (Vasiljevi´c 2012, p. 42).

Conclusion Throughout the 1990s, which was the Yugoslav successor states’ formative period, monuments and museums venerating “brotherhood and unity” had to be erased to create a space for new images of the Second World War within the nascent national frameworks. The demolition of socialist heritage during the wars represented—as the respected journalist Viktor Ivanˇci´c claims regarding the (mis)use of cultural centers—a reckoning between nationalism and inclusive culture (Ivanˇci´c et al. 2018). Some of the Second World War front lines matched several of those from the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia in the 1990s. Consequently, NOB museums were transformed into spaces for army accommodation, and their collections were targeted, ransacked, and in some cases destroyed. The memorial houses in Croatia and Bosnia and

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Herzegovina were deliberately left in ruins, while in Serbia they deteriorated. The systematic destruction of NOB heritage symbolically conveyed the “liberation” of (national) history from the shackles of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. While in the hierarchy of Second World War musealization in Yugoslavia, the revolution and the NOB struggle were a top priority, in the successor states the process of nationalizing Second World War history focused primarily on the memorialization of the victims of war. In Serbia, the Ustashe regime’s killing of Serbs formed the source and foundation for creating a model of national Second World War remembrance in the mid-1980s and especially in the first half of the 1990s. Serbian Orthodox priests conducted religious liturgies in Second World War memorial areas, a practice that began in the 1990s and that still occurs, illustrating the performance of new ethnonational borders of memory. The crowning feature in Serbia’s shift toward martyr-dominated remembrance was the founding of the Museum of the Victims of Genocide in 1992, as the umbrella institution for researching and musealizing the remembrance of—as the name itself claims—genocide committed against the Serbs, Jews, and Roma in the twentieth century. The ambivalent politics toward socialist heritage in 1990s Serbia were clear to see in the decision to establish the Museum of Yugoslav History in 1996. The fall of Slobodan Miloševi´c’s government (in 2000) opened the door to a politics that sought to erase communist symbolism. Shortly after, the Second World War displays were updated by adding museum objects or installations that presented the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland as the second, nationally inclined resistance movement during the Second World War (Jareb 2011, pp. 155–156). The mechanisms of historical revisionism in Croatia have been similar: the criminal character of the Independent State of Croatia has been lessened, especially during Franjo Tudjman’s government, whose politics pledged “national reconciliation” by situating the victims of Jasenovac and Bleiburg in the same category as “victims of totalitarian regimes.” During the same period, in response to Serbian mythomania, Jasenovac victims were minimized in public discourse, and Bleiburg victims were pronounced innocent patriots who lost their lives fighting for an independent Croatia. Throughout the war, but also in the postwar period, in Croatia— more than anywhere else in the region—NOB monuments and memorial plaques were destroyed, while libraries were “cleansed” of Serbian authors

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and texts using the Cyrillic script. The sole remaining museum on the territory of Croatia after the fall of Yugoslavia that deals with the horrific aftermath of Ustashe ideology, and which is also the only independent Second World War memorial museum, is the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. During Yugoslavia, there were several memorial houses dedicated to remembering the Independent State of Croatia concentration camps, yet not even one operates today. In Croatia today, there is no independent Second World War memorial museum dedicated to the mass participation of the Croatian population in the Partisans. Indeed, the Association of Antifascist Fighters and the Antifascists of Šibenik founded a memorial room symbolically called the Museum of Victory and Liberation of Dalmatia. As a memorial space of countermemory, with collections acquired from private collectors, it has not gained the status of a state institution. This state’s unwillingness to recognize it is why its founders chose to name the memorial room a “museum.” Bosnia and Herzegovina left Yugoslavia through war amid the reciprocal burgeoning of fears among the three largest ethnic groups, which were also constitutive nations. It is therefore unsurprising that the narratives produced from the 1990s onward were kindled by political instrumentalization of the historical narrative of the civil war waged throughout the Second World War. The impact of this revisionist wave is illustrated by the well-known fact that in the war period (1992–1995) it was commonplace among the general population to use the pejorative labels Chetnik, Ustashe, or Balija to label their opponents. A brief glance at the museum landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war also illustrates the road to the development of parallel cultures of memory. This has been cultivated over more than three decades now, without respite or alternatives. During the war’s fiercest clashes (1993) the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina changed its name to the Museum of the History of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While under grenade fire, its employees collected testimonies of the siege of Sarajevo, which are a trademark of this museum institution today. Equally, during the war (1992), by renaming the Museum of Bosnian Krajina, the Museum of Republika Srpska was founded. During the war, the Museum of Republika Srpska produced several exhibitions. The trend of investing in museums continued over the coming decades, implying that Republika Srpska recognized a powerful lever

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in the museum institution for building an ethnonationalist identity. In contrast, this is not the case in the Federation of BiH entity. The overall remembrance cultures in the respective Croatian and Serbian parts of Dayton-divided Bosnia and Herzegovina closely align with the memory politics of the “motherlands” of Serbia and Croatia. As far as the Bosniak population is concerned, redefining the attitude toward Second World War heritage under these new sociopolitical circumstances has two important aspects. The first aspect links to the efforts invested in preserving symbols of Bosnia and Herzegovinian statehood grounded in ZAVNOBiH. The second aspect links to the merging of the People’s Liberation Struggle (1941–1945) and the “aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina” (1992–1995) narratives into one historical account. In addition, there is a tendency to relativize and silence the role of this ethnic group’s participation in the NDH regime. The reasons for the insufficient political, financial, and research attention paid to Second World War themes in the Federation of BiH entity lies in the focus that this part of Bosnia and Herzegovina has placed on the memorialization and musealization of the victims of the 1992..–1995 wars, as part of the dominant narrative of creating a post-Dayton Bosniak nation. Ethnocentric collective memory, in not only Bosnia and Herzegovina but also Croatia and Serbia, is based on an institutionalized narrative of unrelenting conflict between the three neighboring states. While the epicenter of Yugoslav remembrance politics was focused on reconciliation, that is, on the insistence on a shared antifascist commitment in the Second World War, the more recent schoolbook histories of the Second World War have sought to further interethnic historical, political, and cultural differences, with the final goal—based on the 1990s wars—being to provide the historical legitimacy for the maturation of a nation-building process. Despite the Yugoslav Agreement on Succession Issues, which the Yugoslav successor states signed to commit themselves to preventing the loss of Socialist Yugoslav heritage of international importance, after the breakup of Yugoslavia the Second World War memorial landscape reduced dramatically. The institutions that remained are dedicated to Second World War topics that are deemed “useful” memory from the perspective of the state or local authorities. The arbitrary division of museum institutions in line with the new state borders has led to the separation and therefore doubling of specific memorial wholes. Another result is the radical change in the politics of representation that relates to a formerly

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shared history. Here, the Kozara Memorial Park, which in Yugoslavia represented a symbol of “struggle for brotherhood and unity,” mutated into a symbol of Serb suffering and resistance in the Second World War, and it is thus understood as the “foundational pillar of Republika Srpska,” in the words of high-ranking representatives from Serbia and Republika Srpska, as mentioned at the commemorative ceremonies discussed earlier on the text. Or consider, for example, the Museum “21 October” (analyzed in detail in Chapter 6) was a stage for top-level diplomatic gatherings in Yugoslavia, before becoming a site symbolizing Serbian victimhood and Serbian resistance from its two antifascist movements in the 2010s (Gliši´c 2018). The rebuilding of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the largest sponsor of museum’s reconstruction) entailed the restoration of the ritual birthday celebration, this time not (only) in relation to Yugoslavia but (also) in relation to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is noteworthy that in the national discourse of collective historical memory in Croatia, there is not a single Second World War memorial museum that serves as a reservoir of cultural and symbolic narrative mechanisms through which to build a new, nationally bounded collective memory. On the contrary, the historical chapter of the Second World War remains open, which is why the government of the Republic of Croatia established the Council for Dealing with the Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes in 2017.

Notes 1. For more on the debate over the difference between “dissonant heritage” and “heritage dissonance” see Kisi´c (2016, pp. 49–57). 2. For more on the genealogy of the political rivalry related to the instrumentalized discourse on Bleiburg and Jasenovac in 1990s Croatia, see Slavko and Ivo Goldstein (2011). 3. The quotation is from Franjo Tudjman’s address at the first parliament of the HDZ given on February 24, 1990, in Zagreb. See Slavko and Ivo Goldstein (2011, p. 243). 4. All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated. 5. For more on the role of Thompson in the creation of natioanal identity in Croatia see Udoviˇci´c (2020). 6. For more on the rehabilitation of the Ustashe as legitimate Croatian patriots see Pavlakovi´c (2008a, b).

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7. For more on casualties in the Bosnian War, see Zwierzchowski and Tabeau (2010). 8. In this period, for Bosnian Serbs the 1997 edition of the book Istorija za 8. razred osnovne škole by Ga´ceša is used as the history schoolbook, which printed in Belgrade (Ga´ceša et al., 1997) and Dodatak (Supplement ), which is specially printed by the publisher Istoˇcno Sarajevo. The author is Ranko Peji´c (1997) and the book is called Dodatak udžbeniku istorije za 8. razred osnovne škole. For the Bosnian Croats, the textbook by Peri´c printed in Zagreb in 1995 is used (Peri´c, 1995): Povijest za VIII razred osnovne škole. IV izdanje, published by Školska knjiga. Bosniaks used the history textbook called Historija za 8. razred osnovne škole by Imamovi´c, Pelešiˇc, & Ganibegovi´c (1994). The publisher is the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 9. The Bosniak side in the war was colloquially named “Balije,” which is a derogatory name given to the Bosniaks by the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its origins lie in the Ottoman Empire, where it was originally used to refer to Bosnian Turks. 10. Quickly after the declaration of the establishment of Republika Srpska on January 9, 1992—even though this was only legally recognized by the Dayton Constitution of BiH in 1995—the Archive of Republika Srpska was founded. In 1995, Republika Srpska also founded the Office for the Protection of the Cultural-Historical and Natural Heritage of Republika Srpska. See Kulundžija (2010, p. 94). 11. In 2002 the Association of Museum Workers of Republika Srpska was founded. That same year the Museum of Republika Srpska published a guide to the galleries and museums of Republika Srpska. The document on the foundation of the Association of Museum Workers of Republika Srpska has been published in the Journal of the Museum Society of Republika Srpska, in its first edition on pages six and seven. The Museum of Republika Srpska has published the Herald of the Association of Museum Workers in Republika Srpska from 2003. There are no such similar publications in the Federation of BiH. 12. At the occasion, the exhibition catalogue (1994) was published in two languages (Serbian and English). The catalogue author is Mladenko Kumovi´c, the curator of the Museum of Vojvodina. 13. For example, during the fiercest period of the military conflict in 1993, the History Museum of Serbia produced the exhibition Serbia in the Balkan Wars 1912–1913, which was then presented in Republika Srpska (Pale, Banja Luka, Bijeljina) and in the Republic of Serbian Krajina (Knin). The same exhibition was also shown in Kosovo (in Priština, Pe´c, and Leposavi´c). Exhibitions also produced by the History Museum of Serbia that year had the following titles: The Weapons and Equipment of the Medieval Serbian Warrior, Serbia and the Serbian Nation 1941, The

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16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

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Serbian Revolution of 1804, and The Toplica Uprising of 1917 . For more on the production of exhibitions at the Croatian History Museum during the 1990s, see Bingula (2012). For more information consult the official website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site: http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=5056 [Accessed October 19, 2017]; see also Matauši´c (2011, pp. 65–66). It is also worth noting that in 1994, the exhibition Jasenovac – A System of Ustashe Death Camps was opened at the Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad (Serbia). In the exhibition catalogue, Mladenko Kumovi´c (the exhibition author) stated that (by late September 1991) Croatian soldiers had forcibly entered the Jasenovac Memorial Site and mined the graveyards and the bridge on the River Sava. Kumovi´c’s interpretation of these events was that the Serbian army entered the museum afterward to “rescue” the collection, or rather to “liberate” the museum. See Kumovi´c (1994, p. 15). See the website of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum available at: http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=5098 [Accessed March 13, 2018]. See also Matauši´c (2011, pp. 65–66). Mate Rupi´c, the director of the memorial site at the time, estimated that of about 1,500 documents, 450 were missing; of 3,100 photographs at least 1,000 were gone; and of 800 witness statements, 500 were missing; and that as many as 5,000 of the 7,000 questionnaires on the camp inmates had disappeared. A collection of 800 newspaper clippings had also disappeared. In the specialist library, of 2,500 titles only ten books remained! Fortunately, most of the phonetic and film material had been retained, including around 2,500 objects. See Krušelj (2001). See the website of the Memorial Site of Donja Gradina: http://www.juspdonjagradina.org/eng/ [Accessed March 14, 2018]. The competition for the design of the memorial center at the Memorial Site of Donja Gradina was published on the web portal of Radio Televizija Republike Srpske. See Konkurs za izradu idejnog rješenja Memorijalnog centra u Spomen-podruˇcju Donja Gradina (2015). In 2021 the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vuˇci´c, confirmed his agreement with Milorad Dodik (the Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina) on the construction of a memorial center in Donja Gradina. See Fukelj (2021). For more on the history of Stara Gradiška (the concentration camp and prison), see the official website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site: http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6751 [Accessed March 14, 2018]. See the form “Damage to the moveable monuments of culture,” which was filled in by the Commission for Determining the Damage to the Unified Whole of the Memorial Complex “Battle on Batina” on the territory of Croatia on June 18, 1999. The form was made available for

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23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

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inspection courtesy of the author of the new exhibit of the Memorial House “Battle on Batina” in Croatia, the curator of the Croatian History Museum, Nataša Matauši´c. See also the electronic database, War Damage to Museums and Museum Materials in Croatia, at the Museum Documentary Center, available online: http://ratne-stete.mdc.hr/hr/ratne-stete/ detalji/Spomen-dom%20Batinske%20bitke,48.html [Accessed January 14, 2022]. The following items are missing: an antitank machine gun, an M1 carbine 7.62 × 33 mm, three pistols, an automatic submachine gun, an M98 rifle, three hand grenades, four bombs, a patent addition to guns, one antitank bullet, 289 munition pieces for rifles and pistols, one pair of binoculars, and one compass – in total, 307 missing museum pieces. See the form “Damage to the moveable monuments of culture,” which was filled in by the Commission for Determining the Damage to the Unified Whole of the Memorial Complex “Battle on Batina” on the territory of Croatia on June 18, 1999. From Milka Ljuboja’s presentation at the conference The Museum as a Place of Closure (Muzeji kao mesta (za)kljuˇca(va)nja), held in Šabac, Serbia, in September 2016, which I developed and organized. Ibid. The author of the new permanent exhibition is the historian Milka Ljuboja (curator of the City Museum Sombor). See the electronic database War damage to museums and museum materials in Croatia of the Museum Documentary Center, available online: http://ratne-stete.mdc.hr/hr/ratne-stete/detalji/Memori jalni%20park%20Petrova%20Gora,37.html [Accessed January 23, 2022]. The Museum “the Foˇca Period of the People’s Liberation Struggle” (now the Museum of Old Herzegovina), which was a symbol of the Yugoslav military leadership and the prewar political elite, was neither destroyed nor demolished. From an interview with the museum director, Branka Dragiˇcevi´c, in Foˇca, which I conducted on October 15, 2015. Cited from a personal email correspondence with Ðord-e Vukovi´c, March 2016. From Ðord-e Vukovi´c’s presentation at the conference 1944–2015: Museological Apologies of (Dis)continuity, held in Jajce, November 28–29, 2015, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, which I developed and organized. From Davor Midži´c’s presentation at the conference 1944–2015: Museological Apologies of (Dis)continuity, held in Jajce, November 28–29, 2015, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, which I developed and organized. From Drago Trnini´c’s presentation at the conference 1944–2015: Museological Apologies of (Dis)continuity, held in Jajce, November 28–29,

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34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

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2015, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, which I developed and organized. One part of the library reserves, consisting of portraits of Tito, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Marx (drawings by Ðord-e Andrejevi´c Kun) and Tito’s armchair, were removed and placed in a Franciscan monastery, thus surviving the disruption to the museum. See Guši´c (2014). ´ From an interview I conducted with the curator Camil Cero during a research trip to the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” on October 15, 2015. Ibid. The only way of outlining the fate of the Second World War memorial museums in the wars of the 1990s is by collecting statements from curators who worked on the museums’ renewal after the recent wars. Unfortunately, not even oral histories have been collected, neither by the institutions, which were the successors to the museums after the breakup of Yugoslavia, nor by academics. The conference 1945–2015: a Museological Apology of (Dis)continuity, which I conceived and organized with the support of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, was the first museological meeting attended by almost all representatives of the former Yugoslav museums that succeeded the Museums of the Revolution and NOB Museums. It was the first such meeting (and opportunity) at which curators exchanged experiences of working in the museums during and after the recent wars. I conducted an email interview with Elma Hodži´c, the curator of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on September 14, 2017. A statement by Slavica Stefanovi´c (curator at the Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca”) from the conference 1945–2015 Museological Apologies for (Dis)continuity held in Jajce, November 28–29, 2015, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, which I conceptualized and organized. The Memorial Complex of Stolice is testimony to this claim. According to the curator Branka Strajilovi´c, her position was only annulled when Slobodan Miloševi´c was replaced in the year 2000, even though the complex had been abandoned and neglected from the 1990s. Because of this situation at the start of the twenty-first century, Strajilovi´c stated that delegates from Montenegro took away their pavilion. From an interview on May 8, 2016, with the curator. Thanks to her kindness, I was able to visit the Memorial Complex of Stolice because the memorial complex’s unresolved legal situation meant that she still possessed the museum keys as the retired curator. The document is available online: http://heritage.sensecentar.org/ assets/bosna-i-hercegovina/sg-5-03-izvjestaj-devastacija-bcs.pdf [Accessed January 16, 2018].

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40. The situation on the ground, as documented by the Museum Documentary Center, was different from what was officially stated in the documents. It turned out that seventy percent of museum depots do not fulfill the requirements for the preservation of the artifacts because of damp, poor air conditioning, and ventilation issues, Furthermore, moving the museum collections to another site is not possible because there are no metal boxes in which to store the items. 41. The Serbo-Croatian Commission for the Restitution of Cultural Heritage was established in 2003 (46,191 objects from forty-five museums or cultural institutions were stolen during the war in Croatia). See Golubovi´c (2014, p. 372). 42. Ibid. 43. See the website: War Damage to Museums and Galleries in Croatia: http://ratne-stete.mdc.hr/ [Accessed April 23, 2019]. 44. Only the following damaged memorial houses dedicated to events or personalities from the Second World War are listed on the website War Damage to Museums and Galleries in Croatia: the “Rade Konˇcar” Museum in the Plitvice Lakes area (number of items stolen, the museum building is abandoned), Memorial House of the Ribar Family, Vukmani´c Municipality (building damaged during the fighting, museum material looted), Museum of the First Women’s Partisan (mil.) Company, the Trnavac Municipality (the museum collection has disappeared, and the building is in ruins), The First Bolman Battle Memorial, the Bolman Municipality (thirty-nine objects stolen), the museum collection of the Memorial House of the Sixth Lika Proletarian Division (damaged roof, museum items missing). See the Museum Documentation Center website http://ratne-stete.mdc.hr/hr/ratne-stete/detalji/Spomen-dom% 20Batinske%20bitke,48.html [Accessed January 14, 2022]. 45. For example, Adam Dupalo, a Partisan fighter, and the first elected president of the USAOJ (United Alliance of Antifascist Youth of Yugoslavia) and an expert on the circumstances regarding the People’s Liberation Movement in Banija, gave descriptions of examples of the destruction of the memorial houses in Banija, e.g., the memorial house in Glina, the memorial house in Brestik, the Memorial House “Brotherhood and ˇ c Hill in Šamarica, the memorial room in the village of Unity” on Cavi´ Ljeskovac (Dvor na Uni Municipality), the memorial house in the village of Komogovina (Kostajnica Municipality), the memorial house in the village of Svinica (Petrinja Municipality), the memorial house in the village of Živaja (Kostajnica Municipality), the memorial house in the village of Žirovac (Dvor na Uni Municipality) and the Partisan high school of Rujevac (Dvor na Uni Municipality). See Dupalo (2003, pp. 55–61) as cited in Lešaja (2012, p. 374).

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46. The source of the citation is the webpage of the Association of Antifascist Fighters and the Antifascists of Croatia. Available at: https://www.sabh.hr/index.php?option=com_contentandview= articleandid=4andItemid=5 [Accessed May 11, 2018]. 47. The Museum “Lipa remembers” operated from 1969 to 1989. It was the department of the Museum of the Revolution in Rijeka. The museum was dedicated to musealizing the Nazi-, fascist-, and collaborationist-led massacre of the population (280 people) of the village of Lipa (April 30, 1944) with the aim of stopping Partisan resistance in that area. 48. From an interview I conducted with Branko Afrin on September 6, 2015. 49. The Memorial House “NOB in Punat” is dedicated to the People’s Liberation Struggle on the island of Krk. In 2017, the Association of Antifascist Fighters and the antifascists of the island of Krk collected objects, photos, and archive material to transform the Memorial House “NOB in Punat” into a memorial museum dedicated to all wars of the twentieth century on the territory of Krk: the First World War, the Second World War, and the Croatian War of Independence. This initiative has not yet been completed. For this information I would like to thank Darko Fanuko from the Association of Antifascist Fighters and the antifascists of the island of Krk. I interviewed Darko Fanuko on October 12, 2017. 50. See the official website of the Museum of the City of Koprivnica. Available at: http://www.muzej-koprivnica.hr/o-nama/objekti-i-zbirke/ danica/ [Accessed May 9, 2018]. 51. This was a study of the state of museums and other institutions that safeguard and exhibit materials connected with the period of the Labor Movement, the People’s Liberation War, and the socialist reconstruction on the territory of the Socialist Republic of Croatia. See Kanižaj (1988, pp. 5–17). 52. These are: the Museum of the First Conference of the Communist Party of Croatia, the Museum of the Fifth National Conference of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the Museum of the Eighth Conference of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in Zagreb, the Museum of Ivan Goran Kovaˇci´c, the Museum of Rade Konˇcar and the Museum on Vis, better known as Tito’s Cave. Since this study focuses on Second World War memorial museums, it is important to note that the following memorial museums were dedicated to the events (political sessions) preceding the Second World War: the Museum of the First Conference of the Communist Party of Croatia, the Museum of the Fifth People’s Conference of the Communist Party of Croatia, the Museum of the Eighth Conference of the Communist Party of Croatia in Zagreb. 53. The Kumrovec Memorial Park consists of the Josip Broz Tito Memorial House and the building of the once presidential residence named Tito’s

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55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

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Villa, which was restored after the breakup of Yugoslavia, while the political school and the sports and recreations center have been destroyed. The history of this memorial building, as well as its present appearance and function, clearly suggest that it is a kind of tabooed, controversial site of memory. During the 1990s, the memorial zone was widely demolished, and the complex itself housed refugees from Vukovar. After the war, the Josip Broz Tito Memorial House was transformed into an ethnohouse for one of Croatia’s largest in situ ethnographic museums, and references to Tito’s political activities were removed. A claim can be made that both the renovated and the destitute buildings in the memorial zone are monuments of sorts, reflecting the attitude of the Croatian state towards shared socialist heritage. See Kuliši´c (2008). See the website of the National Museum Zadar http://nmz.hr/hr/zbi rke/podru%c4%8dna-kulturno-povijesna-zbirka-mali-iz,64.html [Accessed January 9, 2021]. See the website of the commission: http://old.kons.gov.ba/main. php?mod=vijestiandextra=aktuelnostandaction=viewandid_vijesti=667and lang=1 [Accessed October 29, 2017]. Ibid. Drago Trnini´c’s presentation at the conference 1945–2015: Museum Apologies of (Dis)continuity held in Jajce, November 28–29, 2015, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, which I developed and organized. Ibid. ´ The quote is from an interview with Camil Cero, curator of the Museum of Old Herzegovina, which I conducted in October 2015. ´ I conducted an interview with Camil Cero, curator of the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva”, in October 2015. Davor Midži´c’s presentation at the conference 1945–2015: Museological Apologies of (Dis)continuity held in Jajce, November 28–29, 2015, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, which I developed and organized. Ibid. The ruined museum also served as a place in which works of art were created. See Mati´c, G. (2003). Tiho teˇce Sutjeska. Exhibition catalogue. Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art. Some examples include: the Museum Collection of Bijeljina—part of the Centre for Culture and Education, the Collection of the Nemila Youth Workers Brigade—department of the City Museum of Zenica, the Memorial Collection of the High Command in Šeri´ci—department of the City Museum of Zenica, the Mrkonji´c Grad Museum Collection—part of People’s University, the Museum Collection of Gradaˇcac—part of the Vaso Pelagi´c Centre for Education and Culture, the Museum collection Tešanj—part of the Museum of Doboj, the Maglaj Museum Collection— part of the local Culture Center, the Derventa Museum Collection—part

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66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

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of the local Culture Center, Bosanska Gradiška Museum Collection—part of the local Culture Center. For a list of the museum collections from the former Yugoslavia now in Bosnia and Herzegovina, see Maliˇci´c (1984, p. 58). According to Zlatko Maliˇci´c, before the war there were sixteen memorial houses on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina of which the only one still operating today is the Dr. Mladen Stojanovi´c Memorial House in Prijedor. See Maliˇci´c 1984 (pp. 62–63). ˇ The interview with Amra Custo (Kantonalni zavod za zaštitu kulturnohistorijskogi prirodnog naslijed-a Sarajeva) is available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6EsWyJSLgEandfeature=youtube [Accessed October 25, 2017]. See Central Register of Immovable Cultural Goods. Available at: https:// nasledje.gov.rs/index.cfm/spomenici/pretraga_spomenika_new [Accessed August 30, 2017]. The statute is available on the official website of the Association of the Alliance of the People’s Liberation War of Serbia. Available at: http:// www.subnor.org.rs/statut [Accessed May 11, 2018]. Ibid. About the history of memory of 7 July 1941 in the context of the politics of memory on the Second World War in Serbia after the break-up of Yugoslavia see Ðureinovi´c (2017). The Museum Complex “Military Counsel in Stolice” is not open to the public; all the pavilion buildings are overgrown with grass and weeds. The mayor of Krupanj, Ivan Isailovi´c, announced the renovation of the memorial complex in 2018, but it has not yet been completed. See Krupanj-Info (2018). Rekonstrukcija spomen-kompleksa Stolice, July 20. https://radjev inainfo.rs/rekonstrukcija-spomen-kompleksa-stolice/ [Accessed February 20, 2020]. The Museum of the Pioneer and Youth Movements of Yugoslavia— its building, exhibitions, and the collection—belongs to the National Museum Prijepolje, but it is waiting to be renovated. See the website of the Associations “Raid 1942,” available: http://rac ija1942.org/o-memorijalnom-drustvu-racija-1942-curug/ [Accessed April 12, 2018]. The memorial complex of Ravna Gora has three parts: the church of St. George (Cv. Georgije), the monument to Draža Mihailovi´c, and the memorial house dedicated to the Ravna Gora Movement (which also includes an exhibition on the history of the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski pokret obnove) and especially a biography of its leader, Vuk Draškovi´c). The initiative to mark Ravna Gora as a memorial site appeared on May 13, 1990, when Vuk Draškovi´c and his political supporters arrived there to commemorate the Ravna Gora movement, but the assembly was

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prevented by the police. In 1992, the monument of Draža Mihailovi´c (by the sculptor Dragan Nikoli´c) was erected and since then, commemorations have taken place every year on May 11, i.e., the day when Draža Mihailovi´c arrived in Ravna Gora, organized by the Serbian Renewal Movement. St. George’s Church was built in 1994. This church is dedicated, as stated in the memorial-complex flyer, “to the deceased souls of all Serbs killed in the civil war 1941–1945”. A memorial house was completed in 2000 (besides the exhibition spaces there is also a library and a lecture room). 75. See the official website of the Society of Conservators of Serbia (Društvo konzervatora Srbije): https://dks.org.rs/sr/2022/01/20/apel-instituci jama-da-se-spreci-prodaja-memorijalnog-kompleksa-bosko-buha-na-jab uci/ [Accessed February 8, 2022]. 76. Slavoljub Pušica’s presentation during the panel discussions at the conference Museums as a Place of Closure (Muzeji kao mesta (za)kljuˇca(va)nja) in Šabac library, Serbia, on September 2, 2016, which I developed and organized.

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CHAPTER 5

Curating (in) Transition

Abstract Most scholars have followed the post-Yugoslav museal transition by examining individual institutions or by considering them within their national framework. Contrary to the published literature on this topic, this chapter takes a comparative research approach across the postYugoslav space, and it illustrates visible parallels through which Second World War memorial museums have been redefined in postsocialist Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Even though the reconceptualized museums in these states communicate divergent historical narratives, the tactics of their translation into museal realities are surprisingly similar. Through examples from numerous museums, the chapter discusses three dominant clusters of curatorial interventions: (1) deideologization—distancing museum documents from their ideological links, (2) ethnonationalization—viewing Second World War history through the lens of the nineties wars, and (3) decontextualization—retaining the permanent exhibitions designed in Yugoslavia without changing them.

Introduction A brief overview of transformations in Second World War museums after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Eastern Europe demonstrates that many parallels with the slow reform of these institutions can be found in the post-Yugoslav context. For instance, the reconstructed narrative of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_5

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Second World War exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Dresden after the fall of communism show “the effects of overlapping components of different discourses, and one can still find that they possess many elements of interpretations before 1989–1991” (Bogumił et al. 2015, p. 3). The historian Nikolai Vukov (2009) analyzed museums and monuments related to postsocialist transition in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, and he reached the conclusion that, while “diverging in their aesthetic and political effects, they are joined in the common intention to undo the former representation and in the shared task to visualize the rupture opened between the present and the past.” The sociologist Todor Kulji´c (2011, p. 148) claimed that “in museums about communism in countries in transition there is visible confusion in the post-socialist discourse of the past which oscillates between attempts to condemn the past and the lack of discursive resources to recreate this narrative.” The historian Simina B˘adic˘a’s (2013, p. 295) research into the most important museum institutions in Romania that were founded in the 1950s and 1990s argues that the “communist and anticommunist museum display strikingly different narratives yet the manner in which these narratives are exhibited is remarkably similar.” The historian Ilya Budraitskis (2014, pp. 11–18) emphasized, in the post-Soviet memorial landscape context, that the former museums of the revolution cannot be transposed by simply changing their name because mechanisms for knowledge creation are woven into the core of all these institutions’ collections. In the newfound social circumstances, curators were unable to “liberate” themselves from these mechanisms. As the anthropologist Thalia Gigerenzer (2013) warned, several regional museums (Heimatmuseen) built in the German Democratic Republic have become frozen images of the GDR, that is, social Gesamtexponaten. In other words, decades after the unification of the two Germanies, there are still examples of museums or museum exhibitions that have remained unchanged in terms of content and await the resolution of their status. All the mentioned traits of the “museum transition” in Eastern Europe are equally represented in the post-Yugoslav context, in which “red museums have been forced to reinvent themselves repeatedly” (Širok 2018, p. 27). The prehistory of these “museums of communism” (Norris 2020), stemming from the methodological matrixes of Marxist–Leninist museology, is the common cause of the identity crisis of museum institutions in East and Southeast Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their sudden entry into new social (and state) orders has transformed these

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institutions into metamuseums—“doubly historical places” (KirshenblattGimblett 2000). In uncovering correlations between museum reforms in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, the conclusion can be reached that these reforms, less than three decades after the breakup of Yugoslavia, continue to be a reaction to the inherited state of museum collections and exhibitions rather than a shift toward the creation of new collections and exhibitions. Three dominant clusters of curatorial interventions are evident: (1) the museal narrative of communist ideology has been cleansed, (2) exhibitions dedicated to the wars of the nineties have been installed alongside the Second World War exhibitions, and (3) a reflexive approach has been taken i.e., there are exhibitions untouched from the Yugoslav period. Unlike the rewritten history schoolbooks, museum collections cannot be taken apart and reformulated so quickly. Thus, in the absence of new methodologies of exhibiting and collecting, curators are forced to intervene in the exhibitions’ already-existing, obsolete curricula by adding new and discarding old parts of the museum installations. The overlapping of curatorial strategies in the transformation of the former People’s Liberation Struggle museums in successor states demonstrates the kaleidoscopic picture (Jagdhuhn 2021) of the post-Yugoslav “museal turn” (Coelsch-Foisner and Brown 2012).

Distancing Museum Documents from Their Ideological Links With nationalism replacing communism as the binding ideology of the successor states in the 1990s, there was a perceived need to cleanse museums of communist class ideology (Matkovi´c 2018, p. 63), which had previously suppressed nationalist and ethnic sentiments from the museal narrative. Such liberation from Yugoslavia’s “regime museology” (Findor and Lášticová 2008) is also apparent in the straightforward erasure of the war slogans of the communist leaders, which had been a part of Second World War exhibitions in Yugoslavia. In the case of the reworked Second World War exhibition at the Museum of Old Herzegovina in Foˇca, for example, slogans such as “Long live the People’s Liberation Front of all the Peoples of Yugoslavia!” “Long live our heroic People’s Liberation Partisan and Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia!” “Long live the heroic Red Army!”, etc. were removed. The complete removal of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s symbols also occurred at the Museum of the First

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AVNOJ Session. In Yugoslavia this museum’s concept was to simulate the historical appearance of the space in which the First AVNOJ Session took place. It was damaged during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the museum’s renovation and reopening in 2013, all that was left of the historic stage was the slogan “Death to Fascism – Freedom to the People!” (Fig. 5.1). The largest exhibit in the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session—a portrait drawing of Tito with a Partisan cap with the slogan “Long Live the Supreme Commander Comrade Tito!” has been removed, as have other slogans such as “Everyone to the Front, Everything for the Front.” The former memorial museum that safeguarded the memory of the political meeting held there in 1942 has been transformed into an exhibition space with a documentary style, dominated by archivalia and photo documents. It also operates as a town hall available to rent and for organizing various cultural and political events or entertainment. A conference, the Biha´c Creative Republic Session, has been organized since 2015, where leading regional experts from the creative and communication industries

Fig. 5.1 The central part (historical stage) of the permanent display of the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session at the Una-Sana Canton Museum (Photo © Davor Midži´c [curator of the Una-Sana Canton Museum]. Reproduced with the permission of the Una-Sana Canton Museum. Photo © Una-Sana Canton Museum)

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meet, including people from the business world.1 By commenting on this repurposing of the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session the sociologist Hajrudin Hromadži´c stated: We could maintain that one of the most important consequences of these processes of the desubstantialization of the original event and experience in its historical authenticity and originality on to which are soldered some practices in the domains of the creative cultural industries, for example advertising management, is the production of a destilled product in the form of a (re)branded artefact emptied of its essence and substance which thus acquires its market-profit component. (Hromadži´c 2018, p. 25)

In summary, the rebranding and commercialization of the historical spaces is another “de-ideologization tactic” (Koren and Baranovi´c 2009, pp. 96–97) employed in former People’s Liberation Struggle museums. This strategy can also be traced through cultural events organized in the memorial spaces of the following present-day Second World War memorial institutions: Sutjeska National Park (the organizer of the “OK Fest” music festival, held since 2014), the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session (which rents out its space for theater performances and political campaigns—even a wedding ceremony was once held in the historic hall), the Kozara National Park (which has hosted the rock festival “Kozara at Heart” since 2017), etc. In another case, the Museum “Kozara in the NOB” in Mrakovica also avoided communist symbols in its new exhibition. According to the curator and author of the new museum display, Milenko Radi´c: “the old [Yugoslav] display was ideologized, focusing on the Battle on Kozara, and less on the suffering of the people; now we have placed the suffering of civilians on the whole territory [Kozara and Potkozarje] at the center of attention.”2 Amid a “renationalization” strategy—or to use the vocabulary of the historian Wolfgang Höpken (1996), the “de-Yugoslavization and de-Titoization” of the Museum “25 May” in Drvar—it nevertheless ˇ “continued to promote antifascism” (Cauševi´ c 2019, p. 17). Renationalization here was rather the act of changing the museum typology—the narrative was ethnonationalized by expanding the spatial and temporal frame covered by the exhibition. Its new display (since 2009) was entitled Drvar throughout History, and it covered events “from the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 by Austria– Hungary, through the First World War and the interwar period, up to

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the Second World War.” On the introductory panel, the author of this concept, Drago Trnini´c, warns the visitor that “the historical exhibition must value all the events, in order to present objectivity without any ideology, because only in this way can this town and its surrounding area remember the past with pride and move towards a future.”3 Bearing in mind the volatile potential of the reinterpretation of Second World War history through the ethnonationalist lens of the dominant remembrance politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the decision to transform a former People’s Liberation Struggle museum into a type of homeland museum aimed to “calm” the “heated” history of the Second World War by placing it in a wider historical context, thus relieving it of the significance it had for and in the Second Yugoslavia. In Serbia, traces of communism were not removed but rather reduced by creating a shared space for both the museal story of the struggle and suffering of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland in renewed museum exhibitions dedicated to the Second World War. The permanent display of the Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp” and the memorial dedicated to the Red Cross concentration camp in Niš are both typical examples. The Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp” was reconstructed in 2001. As the museum guide explains: “the exhibition is a kind of correction of the previous exhibition from the socialist period, which was more ‘politicized’ and at the time, dealt less with historical reality and more with a kind of cultural pedagogy” (Stojˇci´c 2018, p. 81). Specifically, this meant that in the Yugoslav period exhibition, the fates of many prisoners who were not directly engaged in the resistance movement were avoided. Something similar happened at the Memorial Complex “12 February” (Tamindžija 2018), where the authors of the new permanent exhibition claim that their aim is “to reveal people and events that for ideological reasons have not been prioritized for many years” (Ozimi´c et al. 2014, p. 3). Without asking for the approval of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, the curators chose to update the display on their own initiative. They did so first in 2013, treating the Red Cross camp “as a camp for mostly Chetniks” (Suboti´c 2019, p. 91), and then again in 2018 by advancing a new thesis on the concentration camp, claiming that it was a place of equal suffering for Partisans and members of the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland formations.4 One key feature of the transformation of Second World War museum exhibitions in Serbia is that the accomplishments of the antifascist movement led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia were not relinquished,

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but appropriated (Trošt 2020). However, the curators have emphasized that exhibitions in Yugoslavia were markedly ideological. Rather, the more recent additions follow the same museological matrix (with the curator’s text and archival or photographic documents dominating over the objects and setting), but they consist of new museum sections dedicated to the “second resistance movement” led by Draža Mihajlovi´c, which exhibit this new revisionist tendency. The renovated museum display5 on the 1941 Uprising in Užice opened in 2016 after the display’s 22-year hiatus.6 Its new title is Užice Republic. Unlike the other museums that have been listed, in which there is no explanation of the relationship between the two resistance movements in Serbia during the Second World War, the museum in Užice is an exception in that it does not omit the fact that a civil war was waged and that there were strong, primarily ideological differences between the Partisan Movement and Chetnik Movement regarding their warfare and visions of postwar Yugoslavia. The exhibition conveys neither an anticommunist nor an antitotalitarian discourse (Ðureinovi´c 2018). Furthermore, the Chetnik Movement’s collaboration with the Germans was mentioned. However, as the exhibition focuses on the year 1941, visitors who are not well-informed about the intensity of this collaboration and the crimes committed by the Chetniks after 1941, especially in eastern Bosnia, gain the impression that 1941 was not a critical point regarding this movement’s overall role in the war and changes in its warfare. The exhibition’s most striking installation, and the first one to confront the visitor upon entering, is a parallel display of the Partisan and Chetnik movements’ leaders, with the movements contextualized as—in the museum display’s terms—the “formation and actions of two, armed resistance movements.” Not only are prominent members of the Executive Board and the Central National Committee of the Ravna Gora Movement first presented, but beside their names, information on their academic titles is also given. In contrast, Partisan Movement members are labeled with their rank and status in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The same approach is applied to the parallel display of weapons belonging to the Partisan and Chetnik movements—weapons of the same caliber are displayed in a shared museum showcase. The only way to distinguish the origin of the exhibited objects is through labels that mark some objects with a red star (a symbol of the Partisan Movement) and others with a skull and crossbones (a symbol of the Chetnik Movement) (Fig. 5.2).

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Fig. 5.2 The introductory panel to the exhibition Užice Republic (Photo 2017 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

What is important for understanding these transformations of museum spaces is the issue of the depoliticization of antifascism and the ethnicization of Second World War history. This focuses on national reconciliation as advocated by Serbia’s official state politics, and a law was passed in 2004 that places the Partisans and the Chetniks on an equal footing—the Law on the Rights of War Veterans, War Invalids and Their Family Members (Zakon o pravima boraca, vojnih invalida i cˇ lanova njihovih porodica) (Ðureinovi´c 2018; Bešlin 2013, p. 97). The ethnicization of Second World War history is visible in the building of churches, crosses, and chapels as part of existing Second World War memorial parks, against all the architectural and monumental regulations of these landscape heritage units (examples include the Memorial Site “Srem Front” in 2004, and the Memorial Site “21 October” in 2008).7 The issue of “two liberation movements: the ‘national’ and the communist” (Suboti´c 2019, p. 91) is interesting to observe with respect to the 2003 renewal of the Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac (this will be analyzed in detail in Chapter 6). The “old ideologized exhibition of the Museum ‘21 October’” in Kragujevac has been replaced by

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a new one that depicts the Chetnik Movement as a resistance force for the first time. Yet its main focus, as stressed by the curator, is “on crimes against civilians.”8 Arguments in favor of the trend to individualize the victims were also used when planning the new display at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in 2006, and this will also be analyzed in detail in Chapter 6. A shift in focus from the collective as victim to the individual as victim was also applied to the new display at the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers.” The curatorial team aspired “to free the exhibition from the communist idea of the ‘victim,’ and by doing so, to overcome notions of victimization and a sense of injustice, and to make a universal appeal to conscience.”9

Second World War History Through the Lens of the Nineties “The rebirth of an enemy” (Sundhaussen 2006), as a curatorial concept used to create a historical chronology, has been applied to several Second World War memorial museums in Yugoslavia’s successor states in the same manner: one ethnic group attempts to appropriate the antifascist Yugoslav tradition, and by continuing to use the same rhetoric, they represent the 1991–1995 war(s) as Yugoslavia defending itself from the “aggressor,” “secessionists,” or “fascists.” This has been achieved by adding new exhibitions dedicated to the recent wars (1991–1995) in the former People’s Liberation Struggle museums. One such example is the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” where, as mentioned earlier, the exhibition The IV Corps of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been added to the exhibition The Wounded of the Battle on Neretva (in 2013), in line with same thematic plan developed by the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As with many of the People’s Liberation Struggle exhibitions created by the various museums of the revolution, the exhibition on saving the wounded at the Battle on Neretva also opens with a Tito quote: We departed as victors, thanks to the heightened awareness and moral resolve of our fighters, the determination and skill of our unit leaders, from the lowest to the highest rank, with the unwavering conviction of all of us who participated in that battle that our cause is just and that it must end with our victory.10

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The discourse of Yugoslav remembrance politics embodied in resisting the fascist aggressor—from the position of “us” (the Partisans) and “them” (the foreign and domestic enemies)—also recurred at an exhibition dedicated to the war of the 1990s. The text on the exhibition’s first panel reads as follows: The aggression that began and was executed ferociously in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, committed by the former Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, the Chetnik formations of the Serbian Democratic Party, volunteers from Serbia and Montenegro, and other paramilitary units, sought to completely destroy all non-Serbian peoples in the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aggressor’s aim was to take control over the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as quickly as possible, to destroy and exile all non-Serbian peoples, and especially Bosniaks, from their hearths, and to incorporate ethnically cleansed territories into “Greater Serbia.” Resistance to the aggressors across Bosnia and Herzegovina was, thanks to the forces led by patriotism, well organized and in line with objective possibilities and available material and technical resources. This is what it was like in the villages and towns of Herzegovina. At the very beginning of the armed resistance, units of the Patriotic League, the Green Berets, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the territorial defense formed the likes of platoons and companies. As time passed, the defense became more organized and the resistance fiercer. In the second half of 1992, larger military formations emerged – battalions and brigades, and on November 17, 1992 after the decision of the Supreme Command, the AR Bosnia and Herzegovina [The Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina], the 4th corps was formed.11

The Museum of Old Herzegovina was reconstructed in the same way as the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva.” The Second World War exhibition, created in Yugoslavia, has been reinstalled and a memorial room dedicated to the fallen soldiers and civilian victims of the “Defensive Patriotic War” (1998) has been added (the correlation between these two exhibitions will also be studied in detail in Chapter 6). Both exhibitions employ similar aesthetics and rhetoric in their “parallel” exhibitions dealing with the Second World War and the wars of the 1990s. The discourse and aesthetic approach that was cultivated in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was (re)applied to the representation of the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Therefore,

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both exhibitions—in Republika Srpska and in the Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation—aimed to present the members of their respective ethnic groups (Serbs in Foˇca and Bosniaks in Jablanica) both as successors in the heroic antifascist struggle and as incessant victims of aggression. The Bosniaks regarded themselves as the victims of ongoing aggression committed by the Serbs (the Chetniks during the Second World War). Meanwhile, the Serbs regarded themselves as the victims of ongoing aggression committed by the Bosniaks (as supporters of the Independent State of Croatia’s ideology during the Second World War). It is noteworthy that the curators of the two museums, aware that museums cannot feign political neutrality (Clifford 1997, p. 206), had ´ similar strategies for their museum’s guided tours. Camil Cero from the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” said that “when someone from Serbia or Croatia comes, I close the door to The IV Corps of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina exhibition, or I warn them, so that ´ Cero’s statement, whoever wants to watch, can watch.”12 From Camil it may be concluded that the new concept of the museum was produced primarily with the Bosniak population in mind. Comparably, the memorial room dedicated to fallen fighters and civilian victims of the Defensive Patriotic War in the Museum of Old Herzegovina can be visited solely with the curator’s expert guidance. According to the claims of both museums’ curatorial staff, in Foˇca and Jablanica these exhibitions were supposed to be temporary. However, decades have passed, and both remain. The same logic guides the reconstruction of the Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca” after Yugoslavia’s breakup, that is, after the NATO bombing of Serbia. Here, the Second World War exhibition, completely preserved from the Yugoslav period, also starts with a quote from Tito: Here on Kadinjaˇca a dramatic struggle and a tough battle were led against the overwhelmingly superior enemy. Fighters of the Workers’ Battalion, selflessly sacrificing their lives, were determined to stop the enemy at any cost … one Partisan was attacked by fifteen Germans.

The “time capsule” exhibition named The Worker’s Battalion and the Battle on Kadinjaˇca on the ground floor of the Memorial House “Battle on Kadinjaˇca” was accompanied by the Užice Area and the NATO Aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia exhibition. The exhibition relied on photographs, authentic objects, and article clippings that reported on

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the war operations from March to June 1999. The narrator’s voice—i.e., the curator’s “voice,”—was omitted, and a selection of newspaper articles was exhibited in its place. The headlines include: Homeland – Only Ours The Aggressor Attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia They Cannot Kill Our Spirit and Our Stance Bandits with Bombs Demolished the Children’s Resort; Three Persons Were Killed Traces of Inhumanity To What End the Bombing of a Blameless People? Sowers of Death Tried to Destroy the Monument on Kadinjaˇca

The last of a series of texts, published on April 10, 1999, by the state news agency Tanjug, is the statement made by the Veterans’ Organization from the People’s Liberation War of Serbia (the Serbian SUBNOR): The criminal hand of the NATO aggressor directed the destructive power of their missiles at the monument to the heroes of the struggle against fascism on Kadinjaˇca, as the Republican Committee of the SUBNOR of Serbia stated yesterday. The global sowers of death inflicted a painful wound upon the memory of the fallen fighters from the Kadinjaˇca Workers’ Battalion, who defended the Republic of Užice with superhuman strength – the only oasis of freedom in the then occupied Europe, said SUBNOR of Serbia. This cruel and cowardly attack by the NATO aggressor on the monument on Kadinjaˇca, which is one of the most beautiful artistic symbols of courage and heroism of the entire Serbian nation, could only have been ordered by a mindless person who has no history, no respect for national shrines, and no human memory, says the statement.13

In addition to these statements, the display also includes several announcements from the Zlatibor District Headquarters of the Yugoslav Left (the JUL, a political party led by Slobodan Miloševi´c’s wife, Mirjana Markovi´c), a press release with the official statement from the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) on NATO’s bombing, the Nova Varoš SPS press release, and a statement from the SPS district-board director, Milan Marinkovi´c, titled To Slobodan Miloševi´c, the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The statement supported the Serbian leadership and especially Slobodan Miloševi´c:

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The socialists and the citizens of the Zlatibor district offer you their message in their efforts to resolve the problems in Kosovo and Metohija by peaceful means, through negotiations, but also to express their willingness, if necessary, to defend the country against any possible aggressors, just as our ancestors did in the centuries before us.

While using an affirmative tone in the spirit of Yugoslav NOB rhetoric, these quotations reveal that the exhibition presents the politics of Slobodan Miloševi´c—a socialist fighting for territorial integrity, as has been emphasized several times, in the aggression inflicted upon the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The exhibition was opened by Radiša Ðord-evi´c, the JUL coordinator for the Zlatibor district.14 There is no mention of what caused the NATO bombing, i.e., the war in Kosovo and Metohija. The exhibition was installed in 1999. On the commemoration of the 58th anniversary of the Battle on Kadinjaˇca, after the wreath-laying ceremony, a performance by the Užice theater and a liturgy by the Užice church, those present were addressed by the chief of the Yugoslav Army’s General Staff, who emphasized “that in Kadinjaˇca then, and on the bridges today, national honor has been resurrected, the ideal and core of the Serbian people.”15 Despite a lot of criticism and many appeals made by public personalities and citizen associations (Borka Pavi´cevi´c from the Center for Cultural Decontamination and Nataša Kandi´c from the Humanitarian Law Center) that the NATO bombing should not be linked to the Second World War narrative,16 the exhibition has remained unchanged. Nikola Gogi´c, the director of the National Museum in Užice and author of the exhibition, remains adamant in his stance: “both times, in 1941 and 1999, fascists came to demolish my town.”17 After the year 2000, the NATO bombing was musealized in both the ˇ c 2018, p. 67) and the Museum “Old Military Museum in Belgrade (Covi´ 18 Gun Foundery” in Kragujevac. In contrast, the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo have never been musealized in Serbia. Additional sections were added to the chronological displays in the abovementioned museums. Consequently, after the presentation of the Partisan struggle in the Second World War (left unchanged from the Yugoslav period), the visitor faces the same black-and-white museal story about the NATO bombing of Serbia: “a fight between David and Goliath.”19 The exhibition named The Aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, March 24—June 10, 1999, installed by the Museum of the Victims of

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Genocide, was exhibited in the Museum of Old Herzegovina in Foˇca in 2014. It (mis)uses the NATO bombing theme to present “the continuity in bombing the people of Serbia in the twentieth century.”20 Unlike Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Croatia no memorial museums dedicated to the Second World War have been reconstructed as permanent displays reflecting the wars of 1991–1995. Yet it is noteworthy that on Croatian territory, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, there are only three Second World War memorial museums in operation: in Jasenovac, in the village of Lipa, and in the village of Batina (a port on the Danube). Nevertheless, there are numerous examples of “interventions” made in Second World War memorial areas, which have completely changed the meaning of the site of remembrance. For instance, in Okuˇcani in 1995 a monument was destroyed (a memorial ossuary with the remains of thirty-three Partisans) and in 2000, a monument dedicated to Croatian defenders who died in Operation Flash was erected in its place. In Gospi´c, a monument dedicated to the Fallen Fighters and Victims of Fascism in the Gospi´c District was demolished in 1991 and substituted in 2000 with a Monument to the Fallen Heroes of the Croatian War of Independence. In the village of Reˇcica near Karlovac, a monument and tomb to the fallen fighters of the 10th Krajina Division has been replaced with a monument to the fallen soldiers of the Croatian homeland in 1941–1945 and 1991–1995. In Orahovica, the Monument to Fallen NOR Fighters and Victims of Fascist Terror has been destroyed and replaced with a Monument to the Defenders from the Croatian War of Independence. The same fate also befell the Monument to the Fallen Fighters and Victims of Fascist Terror in the village of Ivanska in the Bjelovar-Bilogora County.21 The erasure of Second World War memorial areas to build memorials to the 1990s war has, to my knowledge, not been witnessed in Serbia. However, there are numerous examples of this in Republika Srpska. Unlike the Croatian example, in Republika Srpska Second World War monuments were instead customized through direct interventions made to memorials, by adding the commemoration of victims of the 1992– 1995 war. For instance, in 2014 in the Park of National Heroes in Prnjavor (Republika Srpska), a memorial plaque was uncovered and a monument was dedicated to seventy-one fighters and civilians who lost their lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Thus, a memorial dedicated to four Second World War national heroes from

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the Prnjavor municipality (the Partisans Rada Vranješevi´c, Stanko Vukašinovi´c, Novak Pivaševi´c, and Vid Nježi´c) was built as part of a hub in the town center, with benches and decorative greenery. It was later changed by placing a bust dedicated to fallen soldiers from the “Defensive Patriotic War of Republika Srpska.” The bust displays a figure with a crown on his head and an Orthodox cross in his hand. The Prnjavor municipality is the sponsor of the “new” memorial complex, and the initiative stemmed from the Fighters’ Organization of Republika Srpska (Figs. 5.3 and 5.4). ˇ cava, in the Tesli´c Another example can be found in the village of Ceˇ municipality, where a new monument has been built in front of the “Jevrem Stankovi´c” primary school. It is a granite (Serbian) cockade (eagle with crown) with the engraved portraits and names of fallen soldiers from the last war. This new monument stands right beside the old one and a concrete stand links them.22 Thus, the Monument to the Victims of Fascism (1976) has been merged with the Monument to the Fallen Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War 1992–1995. Also, in the village of Kravice (Republika Srpska), there is a monument that commemorates both the victims of the Second World War (6,496 Serbian victims) and of the Bosnian war in the 1990s (3,267 Serbian victims). When considering the role of this monument, it must be noted that it is extremely close (less than ten kilometers) to the Srebrenica–Potoˇcari

Fig. 5.3 Memorial area in Prnjavor (Photo 2022 © by Jelena Fužinato, 2022)

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Fig. 5.4 Memorial area in Prnjavor (Photo 2022 © by Jelena Fužinato)

Memorial dedicated to the 8,372 Bosniaks who were killed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska in 1995 (Karge 2021, p. 77). These examples, in which new and old memorial entities merge, are in fact identical strategies for the nationalizing of collective memory. They have been introduced to the abovementioned museums, such as the Museum of Republika Srpska, or they feature as interventions made to the permanent display of the Museum at Mrakovica (the exhibition The Genocide of the Serbian People in the 20th Century was installed for thirteen years from 1999 to 2012). One particular trait of the exhibition in Mrakovica is its “forensic aesthetics,” mostly achieved using photographic material showing dismembered bodies, the bodily remains of adults and children, pictures from the concentration camp, and so on (Moll 2012, p. 97). It is based on Slobodan Miloševi´c’s rhetoric that described the Serbs as victims of genocide for hundreds of years (Staveland 2007). The state politics of Republika Srpska, visible in many statements made by the authorities, argue that the creation and preservation of Republika Srpska lies in the remembrance politics based on the mass suffering of Serbs in the twentieth century (Correia, 2013, p. 330). This can be seen in the project of a common history textbook,23 with the nationalist victimhood narrative at the heart of Serbia’s memory politics.

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The strategy of evaluating Second World War history through the lens of the wars of the 1990s—through the inverted concept of the victim in every successor state—forms the basis for understanding the process of the ethnonationalization of Second World War history. This process materializes both in school textbooks and in the transformation of monuments and museums dedicated to the Second World War. Thus, the war and postwar period (i.e., the 1990s) does not represent a gap between two state systems (and their sociocultural values), but rather a base from which an ethnocentric culture of memory arose in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia.

The Pedagogical Function of “Time Capsule” Exhibitions Due to the lack of a political consensus concerning the history of the Second World War in the former Yugoslav region, for decades (since 1995) new governments have simply bypassed the former People’s Liberation Struggle museums. Consequently, many of the Second World War exhibitions that were not demolished in the 1991–1995 wars have been insulated from change. This means that they preserve the order and knowledge formations created in Yugoslavia. The Second World War exhibitions that function as a kind of testimony to Yugoslav memory politics are the following: The Battle for the Wounded on Neretva, The Worker’s Battalion and the Battle on Kadinjaˇca, and The First Proletarian Brigade in Rudo. The exhibition at the Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp” and one part of the exhibition of the Museum “12 February” have been retained from the Yugoslav period but have been allocated new museum sections. Besides all these exhibitions, there are numerous “time capsule museums” that are only opened by prior appointment with not a single curator employed. These include the Museum “Srem Front,” the Memoˇ rial House “NOB in Punat,” the Memorial House “Janko Cmelik,” the Museum “7 July” in Bela Crkva, the Museum Complex “Military Counsel in Stolice,” and the Memorial House “Battle on Batina.” Besides these two categories of museum, when considering the reasons and aims behind these entire museums or entire Second World War exhibitions, one should bear in mind that a very small number of the Second World War memorial museums have been completely transformed. Only the Memorial Centre

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“Lipa Remembers,” the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, and the Museum “21 October” have been entirely renovated. Also, some Second World War memorial museums have been turned into permanent exhibitions. Examples include the Museum of the First AVNOJ Session and the Museum “the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle.” It is important to add that almost all memorial houses (except the Memorial House “Battle on Batina” in Croatia, where the old objects have just been rearranged and the Memorial House “Ivan Goran Kovaˇci´c”) that are in function after the breakup of Yugoslavia, have retained intact historical (and museological) artifacts. These include the Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska,” the Memorial House “Boško Buha,” the Memorial House “People’s Liberation Struggle in Punat,”24 the Memorial Collection “People’s Liberation Movement on the island 26 ˇ of Iž,”25 and the Memorial House “Janko Cmelik.” After the breakup of Yugoslavia, most of the Second World War memorial museums were transformed by partial interventions with new sections added. In this way, the new-but-old museums became doubly musealized spaces. The act of showing the old exhibitions created in the former Yugoslavia resolved the visitor’s awareness of themselves as viewing subjects and of how that constellation opens up space for thinking about the museum object as governed by the code of performance. One question arises: is the retention of obsolete exhibitions a legitimate curatorial strategy or is it about not finding a way to express newer forms of musealizing the Second World War? What is true is that these institutions problematize the loss of the values on which their collections, exhibitions, and the institutions themselves are based. They do so in how they provide visitors with an opportunity to peek behind the scenes “of the Yugoslav founding myth,” now with the benefit of historical distance. The museum object may be the same, but the cultural environment in which that object (re)appeared, formerly in Yugoslavia and today in the successor states, is completely different (Figs. 5.5 and 5.6). This rather superficial overview of photographs of the museums clearly indicates how these Second World War exhibitions belong to a time different from the period in which they were photographed. Busts of Tito, photographs, and quotations from the ideological cornerstones of their narratives, piles of weaponry as a symbol of the Partisan resistance, brown exhibition “shells”—i.e., the upholstered walls of the exhibition spaces designed to visually blend the objects, texts, and works of art into one coherent “three-dimensional story,” are all clear signs of the Yugoslav socialist tradition and the identity attached to it.

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Fig. 5.5 Museum “Srem Front” (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

Fig. 5.6 Museum “7 July” in Bela Crkva (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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The museologist Esad Delibaši´c (1991, p. 35) reminds us that “the museum is always a sign of a culture.” The performative value that the objects earn in this case, as opposed to the previous authoritative approach of the museum objects that were subordinated exclusively to the role of providing historical evidence and testimony, has been freed in the new social and museological context (of these objects) from the role of documenting the past. Now, they reappear within a grid of new values—those that the visitor brings to the creation of the museum contextuality. Therefore, their interpretation is now located in the visitor’s capacity for inquiry. They become the interpreter, unlike in the previous situation where the interpretation was entrusted to the musealized object or exhibition. However, the museum as a state-owned political institution can never be a neutral channel of communication, even when it proposes that what is in front of you is not “history” but a set of representational tools for historical reasoning. A readiness to expose the “uprooted” condition of a museum or exhibition should be understood as encouraging visitors to reveal the roles and meanings of an object, as they were communicated during the Yugoslav period. They are prompted not to study the events of the Second World War but rather how this period was remembered and museologically fashioned into becoming a “usable past” (Smith 2006) in the Socialist Yugoslavia. Curators often mention two motivating factors that they use to justify leaving the Second World War museums and exhibitions as they were when made in Yugoslavia. The first group (of curators) takes the view that the exhibitions formed in Yugoslavia don’t need to be changed because the exhibitions embody a critical review of the institution of memory in the communist period. As the current director of the Museum of Prijepolje explained when referring to the Museum of the Pioneer and Youth Movements of Yugoslavia: “We need to maintain the museum in the condition in which it was conceived in Yugoslavia, so that curators don’t build any more [ideological] museums of this type.”27 On the contrary, there are a great number of curators whose motivation for copying the museum panels, parts of, or even entire exhibitions and museums in a way identical to how they were in Yugoslavia lies in the idea of preserving and defending “history.” As these curators usually stated, this entails defending the historical facts from a wave of ethnonationalist revisionism. Indeed, this was the tendency that the renovation of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session aspired to, as did the exhibition of the Museum

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“Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” and the two “Battle on Batina” memorial houses or museums in Croatia and Serbia). Even though these museums directly used the old, former Yugoslav exhibition concepts when renovating their exhibitions, this type of referentiality was directed more toward a reluctance to take on the challenge of creating new museum displays rather than self-reflexivity as a curatorially conscious act. The only two museums that have consciously developed this self-reflexive approach are the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers,” through how it has transformed its museum space, and the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, through how it has created a scenario in which November 29 is celebrated (Jagdhuhn 2017). The Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers” is a museum that has thematized its own museological discourse from the time of Yugoslavia through its renovation (2015). It has achieved this by exhibiting a maquette of the former sections of the museum display, by exhibiting an installation of German helmets once again, and by creating an audio recording of the retired curator, Danica Maljavac, who worked at the museum from its founding in 1968 to its closure in the nineties. In the words of Vana Govi´c (2015, p. 173), the present curator of the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers” and one of the members of the authorial team of the new museum exhibition, in this way “a museographic continuity was created, and so one more tribute to the old museum was paid” (Fig. 5.7). At the entrance to the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers,” the first exhibit that visitors come across is indeed a maquette of the old museum. The text accompanying this exhibit reads: The Lipa Museum was opened in 1968. The ethnographic collection and the preserved ruins were incorporated in May 1969. In the same building a school for preschool children and afterschool activities, for children from Lipa who attended schools in Rupa and Matulji, and a nursery also opened. The museum and schools were run by Danica Maljavac, a history and geography teacher. The museum was closed down in 1989 because of a lack of financial resources, and soon after that the preschool and school department in Lipa were also closed.

Using a self-reflection method, the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers” performs its history through this exhibit, warning that the museum itself is a place of history—“an educational entity” (Lee 2002). At the same time the maquette presents a homage to the authors of the old

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Fig. 5.7 Maquette of the interior of the Museum “Lipa remembers” (1968– 1989) as an exhibit in the Memorial Centre Lipa Remembers (since 2015) (Photo 2017 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

display (the museologist/curator Boško Konˇcar, the historian Anton Giron, the ethnographer Branko Fuˇci´c, the architect Igor Emili, and the architect Darko Turato). The museum’s renovation team stated that this was a very successful, modern museological solution, which is why they chose the referentiality technique for some of the museum installations. Unlike the museums mentioned earlier in the text, which literally transcribed the old texts and made replicas of the old exhibitions and museum sections from the Yugoslav period (e.g., the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva,” Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session), this approach entailed perceptive reflection: a conscious act of reanimating old discursive matrixes related to the museum, while also commenting on them. We can thus ask: What can historical mediation in the museum that has adapted itself to a methodology of being a self-reflective agent of social and cultural change teach us? The audio narration by Danica Maljavac (the curator of the Museum “Lipa Remembers” in the Yugoslav period, and the first female child born in Lipa after the suffering of April 30, 1944,28 when 269 inhabitants of

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Lipa were killed by Nazis29 ) form the backbone of the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers” as a metamuseum. Danica Maljavac’s narration can be interpreted as multifunctional: (1) as a tool of historical mediation (though conventionally as a museum guide), (2) as the oral historical source of the second generation of survivors, and (3) as a metamusealogical mechanism in narrating the museum’s history, since she is the only curator from the Yugoslav period (Fig. 5.8). Maljavac’s testimony about how the historical events of April 30, 1944 were narrated in Yugoslavia has now been transformed into a museum object. It therefore serves as a document of a particular time that inspires multivocality and simulations. Through the curatorial strategies demonstrated and used in revitalizing the Museum “Lipa Remembers,” a metamuseum (Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers”) has been created as a heterotopic place in which the relation to the past may be explored. Even though this is a tendency peculiar to those curators who attempt to “defend” “Yugoslav,” i.e. “NOB museums or exhibitions” from the politics that tried to erase them in the wars of the nineties, this is the singular museological consideration that underpins the social role of the “museum in transition” across the entire post-Yugoslav space.

Fig. 5.8 Exhibition space in which photographs of the massacre are displayed, accompained by an audio of Danica Maljavac (former curator) speaking (Reproduced with permission of the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka. Photo © Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka)

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Conclusion The collapse of Yugoslavia demanded new museological forms and a new interpretation of history. The Second World War memorial museums, as actors in the post-Yugoslav nation-building process, had to be redefined in light of these changes. The issue of translating “regime into democratic museology” (Findor and Lášticová 2008) in the former Yugoslavia, unlike in the former Eastern Bloc, is burdened with the 1990s wartime traces of the Second World War heritage. Due to this, the unavoidable revision of the historical narrative in heritage museums from the Yugoslav period has led to a causal relation with the genesis of demand for the redefinition of the memorial politics of the Second World War in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. A retraditionalization process is actively underway, returning the role of promoting autochthonous ethnonational values to the museums. Given that the transition of the former “People’s Liberation Struggle heritage” primarily entails its departure from the Yugoslav discourse of supranational identity, its fundamental direction is one of differentiation in relation to the former interpretation of the model of a joint (Yugoslav) past, yet while searching for “authentic” parts of the ethnonational cultural history, the traces run deeper into the past. Therefore, the interpretation and communication of plural, multidimensional histories of Second World War heritage was—and still is, for the curators of the Second World War memorial museums—the greatest challenge. Under the new sociopolitical circumstances, they are searching for ways to revitalize “NOB heritage,” which has been divided up according to ethnic criteria, ideologically fragmented, and “uprooted” from its original context in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The questions they face include: How is the history of the “People’s Revolution” to be musealized in a time when its epistemological and political space of deliberation (and action) been abolished? How is the voice of the uprooted heritage to be revived? (Jagdhuhn 2017, pp. 18–19). Seeking answers to these questions, curators in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia have resorted to the same tactics in revitalizing museum displays: (1) deideologization (explicit references to communist ideology have been removed from exhibitions; museum spaces are rented out for various kinds of commercial cultural and artistic events), (2) ethnicization (an ethnic group attempts to appropriate the antifascist Yugoslav movement, and it does so by using the same visual discourse

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and rhetorical discourse to musealize the war history of 1992–1995), and (3) decontextualization (the deliberate act of leaving intact or reproducing exhibitions from the Yugoslav period that, as a consequence, either provokes a feeling of nostalgia for those institutions where curators claim to defend the historical facts from the wave of ethnonationalist revisionism or, on the contrary, mobilizes a critical review of these exhibitions for curators who view time capsule exhibitions as symbols of communist indoctrination). It can be concluded that in all three states considered in this book, the Second World War memorial museums are dominated by a tendency to reinterpret Second World War history with the goal of justifying the toppling of Yugoslav identity and the state. This is the root from which the various curatorial tactics grow out in different directions, with all of them articulating Second World War heritage not only through creating new exhibiting sections but also through the activities that surround the exhibitions, such as organizing different ceremonies within the museum, visiting exhibitions, lectures and talks, speeches at commemorative ceremonies, and interviews with curators or directors for newspapers and the media.

Notes 1. For more on the Biha´c Creative Republic events, see the festival website, available at: http://www.kreativnarepublika.com/ [Accessed May 23, 2018]. 2. From an interview with Milenko Radi´c in October 2015 at the Museum “Kozara in the NOB” at Mrakovica. 3. A quote from the conference 1945–2015: Museological Apologies for (Dis)continuity, held in Jajce on November 29, 2015. 4. In Yugoslavia, the official narrative was that in the concentration camp “12 February”, 15,000 patriots and People’s Liberation Movement sympathizers, Partisans, Gypsies, and Jews were captured. Members of the JVuO were not mentioned. See Centralni registar NKD (Nepokretna kulturna dobra), Republiˇcki zavod za zaštitu spomenika Beograd, CK, 240, Spomen-logor “12. februar.” 5. For more on the old permanent exhibition, see Stanimirovi´c and Markovi´c (1971). 6. The exhibition catalog was written by the exhibition author and senior curator of the National Museum of Užice, Radivoje Papi´c. See Papi´c (2017).

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7. Miroslav Krstonoši´c’s critique (the architect of the Memorial Site “Srem Front”) was published in the newspaper Danas, see Miliki´c (2012). 8. From an interview with the curator Jelena Davidovi´c from the Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac, October 2015. 9. This is directly paraphrased from the document “The Museological Concept of the Permanent Exhibition” (Perinˇci´c 2013, p. 12). The document is a part of the museum archive of the Memorial Centre “Lipa Remembers,” and I was given access to it when visiting the museum in 2016. ´ 10. The exhibition synopsis written by Camil Cero in 2013 in Jablanica. All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated. 11. The museum label includes numerous grammatical and typographical errors, which have been corrected. ´ 12. From an interview with Camil Cero that I conducted in October 2015 at the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva” in Jablanica. 13. The newspaper clipping reveals that the original article was longer, but that for exhibition purposes it has been shortened to the above-cited excerpt. 14. See Užice on the Internet. 1999. “Obeležena 58. godišnjica borbe na Kadinjaˇci,” December 5. Available at: http://www.uzice.net/ui/1999/ u199930.htm [Accessed July 10, 2018]. 15. Ibid. 16. Information from an interview with Nikola Gogi´c that I conducted in October 2016, in the National Museum of Užice. 17. Ibid. 18. See the official website of the Museum: www.muzej-topolivnica.rs/pos tavka/ [Accessed March 11, 2022]. 19. I borrowed the Goliath (NATO) and David (Serbia) metaphor from the report of a Friedrich Schiller University Jena student excursion in 2013. See Haberkorn et al. (2014). 20. See Opština Foˇca. 2014. Izložba “Agresija na SR Jugoslaviju 24.03– 10.06.1999” otvorena u Foˇci. Available at: http://www.opstinafoca.rs. ba/izlozba-agresija-na-sr-jugoslaviju-24-mart-10-jun-1999-otvorena-ufoci/ [Accessed July 11, 2018]. 21. Information on the listed cases of erasing memorial areas dedicated to the Second World War and the memorials that they are replaced with, which link to the victims and fighters of the Croatian War of Independence, have been retrieved from the text written by Dragan Grozdani´c “Bone Abductors.” See Grozdani´c (2017). 22. I am grateful to Jelena Fužinato for this information. 23. After a joint meeting of the parliamentary boards for the education of Serbia and Republika Srpska in 2018, it was announced that an alignment between the national curricula programs (for

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history, geography, Serbian language, nature and society) would be made. See Veˇcernje novosti (2018) “Iste lekcije i preko Drine,” July 4. Available at: http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/drustvo/aktuelno. 290.html:736414-Iste-lekcije-i-preko-Drine [Accessed July 11, 2018]. In 2017, the Association of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists on the Island of Krk began collecting objects, photos, and archival materials in order to transform the Memorial House “NOB in Punat” into a memorial museum dedicated to all wars of the twentieth century on the territory of Krk: the First World War and the Second World War, as well as the 1991– 1995 war. For this information I would like to thank Darko Fanuko from the Association of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists on the Island of Krk. I interviewed Darko Fanuko on October 12, 2017. The Memorial House “People’s Liberation Movement on the Island of Iž” (founded in 1978) has belonged to the Zadar City Museum’s collections of contemporary history since the breakup of Yugoslavia (it is registered with the title “Regional Cultural-Historical Collection Mali Iž”). ˇ Since 1950, the house where Janko Cmelnik was born, a national hero of Slovak origin, has been placed under the protection of the state. Today, besides the exhibition dedicated to the “People’s Liberation Struggle in ˇ Stara Pazova” and the life of Janko Cmelnik, which was completed in Yugoslavia, in 2018 the new ethnographic exhibition dedicated to the Slovak traditional household has been arranged. The memorial house is supported by the tourist agency Stara Pazova. This is a paraphrasing from Slavoljub Pušica’s speech at the panel discussion “Muzeji kao meste (za)kljuˇca(va)nja,” September 2, 2016, Šabac library, Serbia. On the rehabilitation of the village (the return of the first families, public transport, primary school, etc.), see Maljavac (2014, pp. 147–160). For more on the tragedy of the village of Lipa during the Second World War, see Kovaˇci´c et al. (2014, pp. 89–118).

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CHAPTER 6

Exhibitions as Dysfunctional Mosaic Narratives

Abstract This chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia, the Museum of Old Herzegovina in Republika Srpska, and the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Museum “21 October” in Serbia. By analyzing how the exhibition spaces have been reconceptualized in these four museums, it will be possible to glimpse the dominant political vectors present in the abovementioned institutions’ parent states, which determined the direction of the curatorial decisions made. The biographies of selected case study museums exemplify which historical narratives, as the price paid for creating an ethnonationally cohesive interpretation of the past, deepen tensions in the postconflict societies of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, and which historical narratives have created internal ideological splits within these individual states.

Introduction Space and memory, like politics and the museum, are inseparable and interconnected. When considering the museum institution as a social agent, the radical changes in its collections’ meanings are most apparent during sociopolitical turns. This is clearly visible in the transitional road that socialist heritage traveled after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_6

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The (re)musealization of the Second World War in Yugoslavia’s successor states bears a triple burden: 1. As archival units opened because of the change in the political and state system, a new historical cognizance appeared The exaggeration of the number of Second World War victims in Yugoslavia served as a myth upholding the importance of a socialist future: the “overflowing of rivers of blood” (Velikonja 2008, p. 72) was in line with the discourse of Yugoslav cultural remembrance. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, museum curators created new lists of victim names, and new official numbers of victims were thus compiled. By removing terminology that had been strategically created and used by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) in the context of cultural remembrance, including catchphrases such as “victims of fascist terror” and “fallen fighters,” for the first time both the scope of the suffering (in reprisals, concentration camps, etc.) and the participation in the conflict were revealed in ethnic terms. In addition to determining the precise number of victims and discerning their ethnicity, the myth of the communists as having been the only political opponents who were imprisoned and killed in concentration camps was also exposed. Indeed, the victims of the Red Cross and Banjica concentration camps also included members of the Chetnik’s Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland (hereinafter: JVuO), and at execution sites such as Šumarice, not only “victims of the revolution” were killed but “ordinary people” as well. Also, the JVuO’s national resistance to the occupier at the very beginning of the war (from the end of August to the beginning of November 1941), became a historically confirmed fact. 2. New historical understandings lack adequate museum documents New historical knowledge must be backed up with appropriate museum data. In postsocialist Serbia, one of the first museum documents that “suddenly appeared,” moving for the first time from the dark corners of museum storage spaces to the light of museum showcases, was Draža Mihajlovi´c’s (the leader of the royalist Chetniks) arrest warrant, which went on display in the Museum of Yugoslavia,1 the Museum of Vojvodina,2 the Military Museum3 in Belgrade, etc. On the one hand, this document’s existence interestingly extends the framework of the

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collecting policies related to the establishment of Second World War memorial museums in Yugoslavia. On the other hand, objects such as JVuO uniforms, their emblems, weapons, and photographs (which can be seen for instance in the renewed museum display Užice Republic) actually play a role, in the revitalized exhibitions, that contradicts the rationale for introducing these objects into the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle (hereinafter: NOB) museum collections. In addition to the objects that have transcended the history of the museum collection they belonged to, one should bear in mind that the difficulties in guaranteeing new historical interpretations also lie in the museum collections’ inadequate and insufficient contents. For the Užice Republic exhibition—the only completely new museum exhibition in Serbia dedicated to the Second World War—objects had to be borrowed from almost all the museums in Serbia.4 3. The collections and exhibitions that were assembled to promote the values of a state that no longer exists have now become part of the new, reframed museum setting This gap in the collections, also visible in museological language, has been overcome in most Second World War memorial museums through “interventions” such as: removing the parts of the exhibition that refer to the KPJ, building churches within memorial parks, renting out the museum space for political pre-election campaigns, and hosting obligatory guided tours through museum exhibitions. In this way, in museums that display assemblages of two representational paradigms (Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav), there is an interaction between the old and new parts of the exhibition. In a museological sense, the old parts of the exhibition move from an informational to a performative mode of communication. Thus, exhibition components that have been preserved since Yugoslav times, besides offering historical testimony, also attest to the context-led representational matrix. The messages conveyed by the exhibition parts produced in Yugoslavia, and those created in the Yugoslav successor states, create a dysfunctional (mosaic) narrative. This is true irrespective of whether they are commissioned art installations or historical sources that were not part of the museum collections conceptualized in Yugoslavia. The “screen” (Lacan 1978) that exists between the observer and the exhibit emits an image

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of the artifact that trembles, whose content is hazy. This blurred image is the result of two identities, two curricula, two contextual entities, and two heritage regimes, all of which are mobilized through a combination of collection-based museum artifacts (torn from the narrative for which and within which they were created in Yugoslavia) and objects or installations imported to create an ethnonational image of Second World War history. To demonstrate this thesis regarding the three basic problems that burden the revitalization of Second World War memorial museums, the following lines provide a detailed analysis of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia, the Museum of Old Herzegovina in Republika Srpska, the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Memorial Museum “21 October” in Serbia. Considering that not a single Second World War memorial museum in Bosnia and Herzegovina is financed by the state budget, an analysis has been completed of museums that most consistently point to the existence of parallel cultures of memory in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian entities, that is, in Republika Srpska and in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even though none of the post-Yugoslav states addressed in this study have managed to establish an official cultural consensus on Second World War memory to date, it is still possible to speak of dominant revisions to the museum representations in each of these states, which the selected four museums to illustrate: – in Croatia: Jasenovac Museum, as the only state-run Second World War museum (memorial houses dedicated to Ustashe crimes are abolished) is renovated under “the Holocaust template”; – in the Republika Srpska, Second World War memorial museums became a symbol of the mass murder of Serbs in the Ustashe’s Independent State of Croatia; – in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity, the dominant remembrance pattern regarding the Second World War is the updated use of symbols of Bosnian and Herzegovinian statehood based on ZAVNOBiH (The State Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina);

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– in Serbia, the representation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland as the second resistance movement marks a crucial reconceptualization of the Second World War memorial museums after the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Croatia: The Jasenovac Memorial Museum The various musealizations of the Jasenovac concentration camp, first along supranational lines during Yugoslavia and then through the matrixes of transnational Holocaust remembrance politics in postsocialist Croatia, were politically motivated projects.5 The memorialization of crimes committed by the Ustashe in Yugoslavia—using the code phrase “victims of fascist crimes”—were “cleansed” of interethnic hatred. Avoiding “negative memory” (Koselleck 2002; Knigge and Frei 2002), that is, confronting the crimes of the ethnic community of belonging, is even a constant feature in the new museum setup. In both the old and the new exhibition, this was achieved by reading the past through the lens of a “museology of reconciliation”: the first, in the spirit of socialism, set the goal of building the Yugoslav community of “brotherhood and unity” (1968–1991), while the second setup (which opened in 2006) aims to contribute to building a European future (Radoni´c 2010, 2012a, b, 2014, 2018, 2021). The reconceptualization of the permanent setup after the breakup of Yugoslavia was primarily a reaction to the preceding exhibition dating from the Yugoslav period, by comparing the old and new system of representation regarding the crime committed by the Ustashe, one can accurately detect the genealogy of museum display politics. This offers an answer to the central question: how and why have the musealizations of Jasenovac never methodically specified the crimes of the largest concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia (hereinafter: the NDH)? For Yugoslav museologists, “reconciliation in the museum” entailed creating a permanent display at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum that “deals with the great human loss of life between 1941 and 1945.”6 Bogdan Bogdanovi´c’s monument, Stone Flower, “turned toward the sun and freedom, [as] a symbol of the indestructibility of life”7 was the message conveyed by the Jasenovac Memorial Site in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav remembrance culture wove a neutral, impersonal language, writes Bogdanovi´c (2009, p. 79) citing the choice of phrases he used when presenting his draft sketches of the future monument to Josip Broz

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Tito. Using catchwords such as “atheist metaphysics,” “supra-confessional staging ritualism,” and “all-human anthropological memory,” he was able to persuade Tito of the power and aura of the Stone Flower (Bogdanovi´c 2009, p. 80) (Fig. 6.1). According to the curators of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum,8 Bogdanovi´c was one of several people who also advised that the Jasenovac concentration camp foundation, which was the only preserved element of the camp’s entire infrastructure (as the concentration camp was burned and destroyed twice, first by the Ustashe and then by the Partisans),

Fig. 6.1 The monument Stone Flower at Jasenovac Site (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial. Photo © Jasenovac Memorial Site)

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should by no means be reconstructed because any intervention would be far from the original. Indeed: In the Report of the Conservation Institute of the National Republic of Croatia of April 15, 1956, it was stated that there were still traces of barracks and other buildings (foundations and parts of the walls), and that the brickworks had been largely preserved, as had part of the camp railway track and the foundations of the camp wall.9

By removing traces of the camp, the Jasenovac Memorial Museum disregarded the fact that the museum is in situ. The site, therefore, became a place of education, freed from the function of insinuating the (authentic) atmosphere of a place where a crime had been committed. Moreover, “the original sites of buildings and execution sites within the camp itself are marked by earth mounds and hollows.”10 Consequently, when the Stone Flower monument was unveiled in 1966, the Jasenovac Memorial Site, just like the Memorial Park “October in Kragujevac,” was designed as a space in which visitors could peacefully mourn the casualties in a subdued setting. Both these sites have retained this ambience to this day. Unlike the monument and the memorial site’s landscaped environment, the museum in Jasenovac, which opened in 1968, was a place where the cruelty of the crimes committed in the concentration camp was presented very explicitly. The first permanent display, designed by Ksenija Deškovi´c (then curator of the Museum of the People’s Revolution of Croatia), consisted of a monumental sculpture by Dušan Džamonja named Relief Dedicated to the Victims of Fascism in Jasenovac.11 It was on display by the front wall of the exhibition space, and included glass display cases containing the following materials: inmates’ personal items found while reordering the memorial area or during the exhumation of mass graves, original letters written by inmates and by leaders of the illegal camp branch of the Communist Party of Croatia, original Ustashe documents such as referral papers, memoranda on deportations, a copy of the index from the parcel office (i.e., a list of prisoners who had received parcels in 1944), and reproductions of drawings made by Danijel Ozma while he was a camp inmate.12

To the extent that it was influenced by current tendencies in the museology of the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia, the Jasenovac Memorial

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Fig. 6.2 Dušan Džamonja’s sculpture Relief Dedicated to the Victims of Fascism in Jasenovac (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site. © Jasenovac Memorial Site)

Museum was designed along the same lines as the Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac. Džamonja’s sculptural thought materialized in chains, metal plates, and wooden elements shaped like human bones, focused intensely on the torturous camp life and the death of the concentration camp inmates (Fig. 6.2). Different documents and photographs of the camp and the tools used by the Ustashe to kill prisoners were displayed on the walls. Thematic labels informed visitors of the wider context of Nazism and fascism in Yugoslavia and Europe, with a special emphasis on the establishment of the NDH. Also, documents referring to the organized resistance of Jasenovac prisoners were exhibited. The historical date of April 22, which marks the date of the prisoners’ self-organized breakout in 1945, was an occasion when a “youth gathering from across Yugoslavia”13 was held during the socialist Yugoslav period (the official commemoration service for the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp was held on July 4—Fighter’s Day). Approximately 10,000 citizens and visitors from abroad gathered at the youth gatherings, which included a cultural and art program with a choir, orchestra, ballet, and theater productions14 (Figs. 6.3 and 6.4). The 1986 redesigning of the first permanent display in Yugoslavia was created in cooperation with curators from Novi Sad, Serbia (Matauši´c 2011, p. 63; Benˇci´c 2018, p. 48). It was installed at a time when the number of Jasenovac victims—the core detail from which the Jasenovac martyrdom narrative sprang up in Serbia—was a topic of daily discussion in politics. Consequently, this exhibition was likely an attempt to present the Jasenovac crimes in the most explicit way possible. At the same time,

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Fig. 6.3 First permanent museum exhibition—1968 (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site.. Photo © Jasenovac Memorial Site)

Fig. 6.4 Second permanent museum exhibition—1986 (Reproduced with permission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site. Photo © Jasenovac Memorial Site)

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Bogdanovi´c wrote of the threats he received such as “Who are you to forgive them?” (Bogdanovi´c 2009, p. 101), or: “Who did you erect that flower for … and why exactly a flower?” I try to remain cool-headed here. I ask: “What would you build there?” – “The double-edged dagger, comrade, the double-edged dagger, so one can see who killed whom!”15 (Bogdanovi´c 2009, p. 102)

As the photograph shows (Fig. 6.4), the panels on the walls of the first exhibition display were replaced with large-scale photographs of lines of prisoners, as well as “slaughtered human bodies in detail” (Benˇci´c 2018, p. 48; van der Laarse 2013, p. 80). This (belated) brief exhibition included additional objects found when excavating the grounds,16 and even more archival material (an announcement about the executions, the mandatory roundups and forced expulsion of certain ethnic groups, etc.), including the inventory of the concentration camp (stamps, an inkwell, etc.).17 It was a step toward the historical and museological process of making specific references to the fiercely tabooed historical theme of Jasenovac, but in reality “instead of educating, [the exhibition] played an expressively propagandistic role.” (Joviˇci´c 2006, p. 297). Indeed, this exhibition marked the beginning of the habit of applying a “forensic aesthetic” to the visual matrix for exhibitions on the subject of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Serbia and Republika Srpska in the 1990s; this aesthetic ascribed a warmongering character to these exhibitions.18 However, even though a part of the history of Jasenovac was suppressed in the material that refers to the nature of the interethnic conflict, besides the exhibition space, the museum also included a movie theater that screened films about Jasenovac (e.g., Gospel of Evil, directed by Gojko Kastratovi´c; Jasenovac 1945, directed by Bogdan Žiži´c; Blood and Ashes of Jasenovac, directed by Lordan Zafrenovi´c) with extremely distressing scenes of brutal violence that were unfit for young viewers (Kršini´c Lozica 2018). This created an opportunity for the visitor to more “realistically” confront the crimes committed in the Ustashe concentration camp. Visitors’ stories about the atmosphere of horror, that is, the film and photographic materials that could be seen in the Jasenovac Memorial Museum during Yugoslavia, which led school children to faint or experience other psychological reactions, were widely known. Nevertheless, besides the explicit presentation of the crime symbolized by the Jasenovac concentration camp, the museum did not educate

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visitors about the civil war that raged during the Second World War exhibition in Yugoslavia, nor was there an attempt to cultivate coping with the events or assuming responsibility for the negative legacy. Rather, the crimes were those of the “occupier” and the “associates of the occupiers,” that is, the abstract and depersonalized monster of fascism against which the Yugoslav people fought. The Jasenovac Stone Flower monument, which was, and still is, the most potent symbol of the institutionalized memory of Jasenovac, during Yugoslav times, symbolized the rebirth of Yugoslavia, while in postsocialist Croatia it has been transformed into a symbol of remembrance for the (“birth of a”) transnational European community. Therefore, the idea of Jasenovac’s memorialization in Yugoslav times and afterward can be described in the words used by Bogdanovi´c to illustrate his vision of the monument: The melancholy lotus made of prestressed concrete not only prevents evil thoughts on both sides, but even has a certain cathartic effect. It has offended no one. It has threatened no one. It has not sought revenge. Yet it has not hidden the truth. (Bogdanovi´c 2001, p. 167)

As the citation above clearly shows, reconciliation has been and had remained the foundation of attempts to musealize Jasenovac. The same citation was used by the director of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Nataša Joviˇci´c, who led the museum renovation in 2006. However, she was at the center of a scandal when the newspapers claimed she had made a landline call to Dušan Džamonja informing him that his sculpture (Relief ) had been taken down (Špoljar 2018, p. 44). Džamonja’s wall assemblage, whose visual matrix could be described as socialist aestheticism, was a symbol of the spirit of times in which the musealization of the Jasenovac concentration camp was being considered in Yugoslavia. These ideological reasons underpinned the decision made that there was no room for the relief in the new permanent display after the breakup of Yugoslavia (Popovi´c 2005). Unlike Džamonja’s sculpture, Bogdanovi´c’s sculpture—after all the threats to destroy it made during the nineties war—has seemingly become a symbol that surpasses the ideological connotations of the context in which it was made. Although Džamonja’s relief has been returned to the museum—albeit not as part of the permanent display—the production of a new exhibition entailed its distancing from and corrective measures being applied to the prewar exhibition setup.

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There were key points regarding the official number of fatalities and the personalized presentation of the victims in the museum that needed correcting. The new permanent display consists of eleven narrative chapters: (1) The Number of Jasenovac Victims, (2) The Establishment of the NDH, (3) Legal Regulations—The Legalization of Already Committed Crimes and the Basis for Future Crimes Against the Citizens of NDH, (4) Deportations, (5) Establishment of the Ustashe Concentration Camp Jasenovac—The Largest and Most Notorious Concentration Camp, (6) The Death Camp, (7) Labor Camps, (8) The Female Camp, (9) Resistance in the Camp and the Inmates’ Breakout on April 22, 1945, (10) The Stara Gradiška Concentration Camp, (11) The Way Out of the Camp.19 However, according to the coauthor of the permanent display, Nataša Matauši´c,20 besides the mentioned list of exhibition parts textually presented as museum panels, the staging of the dramatic elements has not been conceptualized thematically or chronologically: the visitor can choose to start at any point in the exhibition space. The main curatorial tendency in recent years has been to present the victim through their life story, unlike the old presentation of faceless masses. The act of giving the victims back their dignity, unlike the eeriness created by the pictures of corpses, offers visitors the opportunity to feel empathy with the victims. Besides video interviews with the survivors,21 the glass cases displayed original objects belonging to the prisoners, each one accompanied by a story. The names and surnames of 83,145 victims, alongside information added on their ethnicity, have been placed in three locations in the museum: in the computer database22 (which can be searched using various parameters), on hanging glass plates, and on screens listing the names and surnames of the victims (it would take the visitor nine hours to read each name and surname). The idea for the glass plates conveys the materials’ symbolism. As Matauši´c said: “glass is fragile, just like our life is, and if it breaks it can be used as a weapon.”23 If an observer carefully examined the plates, they would quickly notice that empty ones have been inserted without any names on them, suggesting that the number of victims is not final and that this is the number of identified victims (Fig. 6.5). On an information board named “The Number of Jasenovac Victims,” besides the number of victims of each ethnicity, there is a text commenting on the political background to presenting different numbers of victims to the public both during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia:

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Fig. 6.5 The glass plates exhibit, which lists each victim’s name and surname (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

There have been and still are many debates about the number of victims of this concentration camp, and there have been diametrically opposing views. At the time of Yugoslavia, from 1945 to 1990, the official claim was that 700,000 people were killed in Jasenovac. After 1990, and Croatian independence, the total number of victims was reduced to between 30,000 and 40,000. Neither of these two “truths” were based on systematic and reliable research but are the result of the political use of Jasenovac. In the first case, the aim was to increase and in the other to reduce the number of victims. In recent decades, many institutions and independent researchers have conducted research to determine the whole and actual number of victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp. Part of the research aims to attain a reliable, individualized list of victims based on the method of personal identification. Such a list has in recent years also been conducted by the Jasenovac Memorial public institution. According to current data, the deaths of 81,998 people have been listed by name and confirmed by multiple sources, including 20,038 children under fourteen years of age. Although the final determination of the full and actual number of victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp demands more work and although the identity of all who lost their lives there might never be determined, the known scope of suffering, and especially the motivations for creating this concentration camp, as well as the manner in which the prisoners were killed, are more telling than the figures and names themselves.24

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This is the only museum exhibit created using a nominally (self-)reflective method that does not also entail a (self-)critical attitude. Consider this sentence, formulated in the passive voice: “After 1990, and Croatian independence, the total number of victims was reduced to between 30,000 and 40,000.” The sentence omits the information on who reduced the number of victims to 30,000–40,000 and for what reason. The fact that in 1989 Franjo Tudjman denied the official Yugoslav figure of 700,000 Jasenovac victims and posited a new hypothetical and historical figure of between 30,000 and 40,000, which was generally accepted in the decade of his presidency (1990–1999), has been left out. The political use of the memory of Jasenovac (Geiger 2013, 2020), i.e., the manipulation of the numbers of victims in the Tudjman era, is abstracted using the words “the total number of victims was reduced,” and thus is removed from a politicohistorical context. Hence, the crucial year 2000, in which there was a change in the political culture of memory in Croatia due to Stjepan Mesi´c’s presidency, is also left unmarked. In this year, these figures were changed in the school history textbooks, and for the first time, the number of 80,000 Jasenovac victims was declared official (Radoni´c 2012a, b, pp. 171–72). The second factor contributing to changes in the permanent display was the curators’ intention to present the victims as individuals in the museum; the exhibited artifacts, and portraits of the victims and survivors were thus presented biographically for the first time. Video recordings of surviving prisoners form a key element in this new display, and their statements build up a precise picture of the Jasenovac concentration camp. In place of shocking images of starved or dead bodies, the exhibited photographs—while not displaying scenes of torture or killing—portray moving authentic accounts of the Jasenovac concentration camp. One example is the photograph of a middle-aged man who, upon entering the concentration camp, has to remove his wedding ring (the prisoners were required to surrender their gold, money, and even their medicine). Also, many original objects (not only those from the Jasenovac Memorial Site’s collection but also those borrowed from the Croatian Historical Museum and the Croatian State Archive) created in the camp have been exhibited alongside their stories. Occasionally, the word “here” instead of “camp” is written on the exhibition labels to indicate that this museum exhibition is in situ, as is the case with the panel named “The Number of Jasenovac Victims.” Critics of the new display have highlighted the lack of actual objects on display

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and have claimed that few photographs illustrate the specific character of the Jasenovac concentration camp (der Laarse 2013, p. 82; Pavlakovi´c 2018, pp. 129–30). Unlike the “death industry” administered in Germanmanaged concentration camps, Jasenovac was known as a place where killing had a personal dimension (Mojzes 2011, p. 58). As stated by Mojzes: “the guards were given free rein to exercise their sadistic and pathological inclinations” (Mojzes 2011, p. 59). The torturous methods they used to murder the inmates are illustrated in the exhibition by four objects (a double-edged dagger, sledgehammer, axe, and hammer) placed in a glass case on the floor of the museum (which means that visitors have to stoop or crouch to actually see these objects) (Fig. 6.6). Although the panel named “Death Camp” explicitly lists how prisoners were killed,25 according to the exhibition coauthor Nataša Matauši´c,26 some have also criticized the fact that the new setup has not included explicit images of killings. Indeed, the pictures of suffering in the concentration camp are included on computers where they become secondary museum exhibits. In this sense, the brutal methods used to kill the internees are not prominent but rather fade into the background. This

Fig. 6.6 Tools used to murder prisoners: the double-edged dagger, sledgehammer, axe, and hammer. The label accompanying the exhibited pieces states: “Found in the area of the Camp III Brickyard Jasenovac and in Donja Gradina” (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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means that school groups visiting the museum likely do not encounter these images (on regular exhibition tours), nor do visitor-tourists who have set aside only a few hours for the exhibition. In fact, researchers who come to the museum to study the museum exhibits will most likely be the only ones who make time to examine the materials in detail and will thus come across these photographic exhibits. When analyzing such curatorial decisions, the famous question posed by the historian Peter Burke (2011, p. 191) rears its head: “Who wants whom to remember what, and why?”. The questions of why the perpetrators are not shown (only photographs from a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Ante Paveli´c, and pictures of Slavko Kvaternik and Vjekoslav Maks Luburi´c are in the permanent exhibition) and why the Ustashe regime’s system has not been precisely illustrated have also emerged. The exhibition introduction, a photograph of Ante Paveli´c shaking Hitler’s hand, is most likely the part that ignites the most controversy,27 yet this is also an exhibit that reveals the ineptness of the new exhibition’s authors to deal critically with “difficult heritage” (Macdonald 2008) (Fig.6.7).

Fig. 6.7 The exhibit “Ante Paveli´c on the first official visit to Adolf Hitler” as part of the permanent exhibition at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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As Matauši´c underlines, the “illustrative photograph showing Hitler standing one step above Paveli´c and shaking his hand, supposedly symbolizes that Hitler was above Paveli´c and that the latter is courting him.”28 This is complemented in the exhibition by the following text: Ante Paveli´c on his first official visit to Adolf Hitler, at the residence in Berghof, Austria, on June 7, 1941. On that occasion Hitler gave Paveli´c full support for the policy of genocide against the Serbian population. Ante Paveli´c born 1889 in Bradina (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The founder and leader of the Ustashe movement. From 1941 to 1945 he was the leader of the Independent State of Croatia. After the war he emigrated from Italy to Argentina and then to Spain. He died in Madrid in 1959.29

Many critical visitors have argued that this expositional strategy aims to “free [Croatia] from responsibility,”30 and also the text on the panel titled “The Foundation of the Independent State of Croatia” should consider that: The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was set up in 1941 by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy after the April War via the Ustashe movement, led by Ante Paveli´c. From the early thirties Paveli´c and his associates were opposed to any form of Yugoslav state, and they emphasized how the Serbs were historical enemies of every Croatian state. They promised radical measures against Serbs, Jews, and all real and potential enemies when the Ustashe come to power. The NDH, apart from the area of Croatia, also covered Bosnia and Herzegovina and Srem, but on the Roman Agreement of May 1941 Fascist Italy was ceded a large part of the Eastern Adriatic coast and its immediate hinterland while Horthy’s Hungary annexed Med-umurje and Baranja. Germany and Italy divided the territory of the NDH using the demarcation lines of their occupied zones. Within the areas of their authority they gradually took over increasing power from the civil and military authorities of the NDH. Therefore, it can be said that the NDH was not independent, nor a state, nor Croatian.

Exhibition critics have drawn attention to the fact that this museum installation is part of the introduction, and it, therefore, occupies a rather central position in the permanent exhibition. However, the exhibition author’s intention was not to use this photograph to diminish the historical responsibility of the Independent State of Croatia and its political

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representatives for their war crimes. Rather, the limitations of the exhibition space forced the exhibition authors to condense the highly complex subject of the Second World War on the territory of Croatia into an unenviably small space consisting of two rooms (350 sq m). They tried to overcome this limitation by using multimedia content, but the decision to do this left the impression that the historical context, which is extremely important for an understanding of the establishment and functioning of the Jasenovac concentration camp, had been unjustly neglected. The amount of energy invested in personalizing and acknowledging the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp equals the efforts invested in depersonalizing the “architects” of the NDH ideology and the concentration camp supervisors. Only Paveli´c’s biography has been presented, albeit reduced to five sentences, which—apart from stating his date of birth and death, as well as his political role in establishing and operating the NDH—ignores his character as the leader of Ustashe ideology. In other parts of the exhibition, text accompanying a photograph or section on an information panel is written in the passive voice, thus leaving the perpetrators of crimes unmentioned. For instance, the board discussing the Stara Gradiška concentration camp states the following: “The first group of prisoners, mainly Serbs and Jews, were brought there in May 1941 from Slavonski Brod and Bosanska and Nova Gradiška.” An exhibited photograph showing a line of people being led somewhere by armed soldiers is accompanied by the caption: “Serb orthodox population from Mount Kozara. The picture was taken in either Slavonia or Bosanska Posavina, on the way to the camp in 1942.” An excerpt from an Ustashe propaganda film shows prisoners being taken to carry out hard labor on the dam in Camp III—Brickyard. Its caption reads: “A queue of women in Stara Gradiška camp on their way abroad where they engaged in forced labor.” The conclusion may be that even though the new exhibition does not negate the crimes committed in the Jasenovac concentration camp, it has not been able to establish a new remembrance paradigm that would, unlike its predecessors, open a new chapter in Croatian remembrance culture—one that would open the question of shared responsibility. The multimedia exhibition consists of twenty-seven monitors and numerous light boxes with photographs and documents, all exhibited in dark narrow halls with low ceilings. The models upon which it is based are in line with trends found in the most famous Holocaust museums, such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in

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Washington, and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Nataša Joviˇci´c, the director of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum at the time, emphasized that both prior to and after the opening of the exhibition, “We want to be part of the modern European education and museum system and follow the framework we get from other institutions dealing with these subjects” (as cited in Radoni´c 2012a, b). The Jasenovac Memorial Museum opened just before Croatia joined the European Union. As regards the curatorial tactics applied to the renovation of the museum setup in Jasenovac, the political scientist Ljiljana Radoni´c thus used the epithet “the Europeanization of memory,” that is, “the universalization of the Holocaust” as a tool wherein the Holocaust functions as a negative founding myth of the European Union (Radoni´c 2010, p. 54). The crucial problem here is that the strategies used in building Holocaust museum exhibitions often relate to museums that are not in situ and to museums that deal exclusively with the Holocaust. However, the Jasenovac Memorial Site is located on part of the concentration camp (Camp III—Brickyard), which was not only a Holocaust site but also a site of genocide against the Serbian population (Radoni´c 2011, p. 365). In striving to become a museum implementing the most contemporary museum practices, the Jasenovac Memorial Museum has strayed from its main goal of offering a specific historical and museological analysis of Ustashe crimes in Jasenovac—a task that was waiting to be dealt with after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Instead, the history of the Jasenovac concentration camp has yet again succumbed to “supra-national moral universalism” (Alexander 2002), wherein the museum continues to be a memorial site at which a wave of fascism took numerous innocent lives. The history of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum consists of the long and difficult process of the museum’s founding in Yugoslavia, followed by its destruction and plundering in the 1990s wars, and then its complicated renovation process burdened by the ambition of conforming to “European standards” of memorialization and the need to resist Serbian and Croatian revisionist narratives. Consequently, it is a symbol of memory battles that no longer rage with the same intensity but that still run on. An ambivalent state attitude toward the history of the Second World War is the reason why the government of the Republic of Croatia announced the founding of the Council for Dealing with Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes in 2017. Despite being a full member of the

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European Union (since 2013), Croatia is still in a post-Yugoslav transitional phase of having to acknowledge the undesirable parts of its national history (both from the Second World War and from the 1991–1995 war).

Republika Srpska: The Museum of Old Herzegovina Unlike the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, which retained its original function as a memorial museum after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Museum “the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle”31 was renamed the Museum of Old Herzegovina in a decision made by the Foˇca municipality in 1998. The museum thus lost its status as an independent memorial museum, and it turned into a museum with a municipal character. Its parent museum became the Museum of Herzegovina in Trebinje. Following this decision, the Museum “the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle” became just one of the few permanent exhibitions in the Museum of Old Herzegovina, and its content was reduced but not remusealized. The Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle refers to the historical period called the Foˇca Republic, which lasted 110 days from January 20 to May 10, 1942. In this period Foˇca became a free territory and the Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Movement was moved there. During this period, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Supreme Command headed by Tito made crucial decisions regarding the military, political, and background structure of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOVJ). Considering the historical importance of the topic, even before an independent museum dedicated to this Second World War period was founded, the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle was a topic that was part of the permanent exhibition at the Military Museum of the JNA in Belgrade and the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo (Kojovi´c 1978, p. 3). As was the case with the other Bosnian und Herzegovinian People’s Liberation Struggle museums (i.e., the Museum of the First ZAVNOBiH Session, Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, the Museum “Battle for the Wounded on Neretva,” and the Museum “25 May 1944”), the Museum of the Revolution of BiH was responsible for designing the concepts underpinning the Museum of the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle.32 The building, which was supposed to be renovated to become a museum, was the former Hotel Gerštil—the place

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where Josip Broz Tito, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and the Supreme Headquarters stayed in Foˇca in 1942. The idea was that the museum in Foˇca should be a memorial space designed in a form that unites the needs of a memorial museum and a documentation center (Kojovi´c 1978, p. 3). It was founded in 1956 on the fourteenth anniversary of the inauguration of the Foˇca regulations,33 with the name the Museum of the People’s Liberation Struggle. Although the decision to found the museum was approved by the People’s Committee of the Municipality of Foˇca, in its early years the initiators, i.e., the Main Committee of the Federation of Associations of Veterans from the People’s Liberation Struggle in Foˇca, and the museum curators did not precisely define it. Consequently, by 1958 the museum focused on regional traditions (zaviˇcajni muzej ) and was renamed the Museum of Southeastern Bosnia four years later (Kojovi´c 1978, p. 6). In 1972 the museum reassumed a memorial dimension and was once again renamed the Museum of the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle. It would keep this name until 1998 when it acquired its present name—the Museum of Old Herzegovina. Such changes to the museum’s type and status also necessitated a reorganization of the museum building’s space. Even though the greatest part of the museum’s reserve is made up of collections from the Second World War, for the past two decades ethnographic and historical material from the region of Old Herzegovina has been collected by the museum. As the museum’s function changed, two exhibitions were planned (designed to run from 2002 to 2006): Foˇca in the Past and The Ethnographic Setting.34 In 1998 one more exhibition “moved in”: The Memorial Room of Fallen Soldiers and Civilian Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War (hereinafter: Memorial Room), which was organized and conceptualized by the local Veterans’ Associations of the Army of Republika Srpska. The museum that had once been solely dedicated to the Foˇca Republic had changed its focus in terms of both exhibitions and acquisitions. The decision was taken to halve the size of the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle and to make room for an exhibition dedicated to the Army of Republika Srpska, while the other two museum displays were given separate museum spaces. Due to this redistribution of the museum space, a floor that had earlier been used as an anteroom for the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle today acts as a point at which visitors need to decide whether they want to visit the exhibition about the Second World War (which

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is dedicated to the administrative organs of the Socialist Yugoslavia) or the exhibition devoted to the relatively recent war (1992–1995) and the postwar sociopolitical circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina (whose emphasis is on Foˇca’s fate in the negotiations over the political division of Bosnia and Herzegovina, without mentioning the ethnic cleansing and mass rapes of Bosniak civilians during the war by Serb military, police, and paramilitary forces). A notice taped onto the closed door of the memorial room exhibition suggests to visitors which exhibition they should select. Visitors are cautioned that viewing the memorial room exhibition is only possible when accompanied by a member of the museum staff, while the door to the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle stands wide open. The above notice and an installation—a rectangular backboard installed above an empty pedestal next to the entrance to the memorial room exhibition—that includes the poem Serbian Boys are written in Cyrillic script, which is officially used only in Republika Srpska, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia. This means that many people, especially the younger generation in all other former Yugoslav republics, are not able to read it. In contrast, the title of the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle is written in Latin script, which is officially used throughout the entire West Balkans region. There is no English translation available in either exhibition. A photo-collage installation (portraits of the commanders of the Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Partisan Army of Yugoslavia: Milovan Ðilas, Ivan Milutinovi´c, Aleksandar Rankovi´c Marko, Moša Pijade, Sreten Žujovi´c Crni, and Ivo Lola Ribar), which is placed beside the entrance door of the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle, suggests to visitors that the focus of this exhibition is the leadership of the People’s Liberation Struggle. Thus, even as visitors stand in front of the doors to the two exhibitions, the memorial room exhibition is clearly dedicated to the Serbian victims of the recent Bosnian war, as suggested by the installation and poem Serbian Boys, while the second exhibition is dedicated to the leadership of the People’s Liberation Struggle, as is visible in the photo-collage. These two very different (visual) “invitations” indicate that the exhibitions deal with the state-building processes inculcated through two different wars: one through unity and communion, and the other through aggression and secession. Except for school tours (only schools from the territory of Republika Srpska visit the Museum of Old Herzegovina), there are rarely any

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other group visits to both museum exhibitions. In fact, they lie relatively forgotten until moments in which commemorative gatherings push them under the spotlight. While the exhibition on the Second World War is visited by antifascist associations from all the former Yugoslav republics, the memorial room dedicated to the fallen fighters of Republika Srpska is visited by the local authorities and its representatives and veterans’ associations on national holidays, i.e., on January 9—the Day of Republika Srpska, and on February 14—Fighter’s Day. However, if a visitor peeks through the glass doors of both exhibitions, they will be surprised by how much they have in common visually. They are both housed in identical “scenography-shells.” They both have yellow-paneled walls and ochercolored museum showcases in which documents and black-and-white photographs are on display (Figs. 6.8 and 6.9). Although the aesthetics cannot be perceived as being opposed to the political layers of the displays (Rancière 2010), for these two exhibitions, two different (political) messages are transmitted using the same means of visual communication, thus establishing their interdependence. The content of the museum exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle has slightly changed from the Yugoslav period: it has just been squeezed

Fig. 6.8 The Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle exhibition (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Old Herzegovina. Photo © Museum of Old Herzegovina)

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Fig. 6.9 Memorial Room Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers and Civilian Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Old Herzegovina. Photo © Museum of Old Herzegovina

into a smaller area. The memorial room virtually pushes the People’s Liberation Struggle exhibition into one corner. It was designed to fit into the existing museum interior. There weren’t enough funds to restore the old layout or to create a completely new one for either of the exhibitions. The curator Danko Mihailovi´c states that the Second World War exhibition “essentially remained the same, only its volume was reduced and it was freed from ideology; we got rid of the quotations and glorifications of the Yugoslav Communist Party.”35 Before 1998, that is, before the space of the People’s Liberation Struggle exhibition was halved to make space for the memorial room, the permanent exhibition contained 377 exhibits, ninety-six photographs, ninety archival documents, eighty-five three-dimensional objects, and eight works of art, while the remainder was printed material (newspapers, brochures, and books), replicas, etc. (Kojovi´c 1978, p. 141). The exhibition’s conceptual design, split into nine thematic sections36 designed in the Yugoslav period, was retained but condensed into a much smaller space. Photographs, documents, and authentic objects were mixed, complementing and explaining one another in a wall collage. The themes were not presented chronologically, but within each thematic unit, the items presented were classified chronologically. The exhibition had an evocative and documentary character. Even though the exhibition was conceptualized as late as 1970, it nevertheless sought to pursue a “Soviet school” approach. The reason

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why methods and teaching approaches specific to Marxist–Leninist museology were applied to the visual language constructed in the Museum “the Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle” are visible in the museum’s ideological mission. This entailed demonstrating the development of the authority and the foundation of the legal system through the document “Foˇca regulations” and depicting the journey through which the KPJ’s leadership of the Partisan Movement, even in the wartime period, paved the way for the formation of a new social order that was formalized when the KPJ came to rule at the end of the Second World War. Photographs and archival material thus play a dominant role. Leaflets, orders, and correspondence between military commanders are interpreted as historical evidence in the exhibition. Maps are exhibited as galvanized square plates that are shiny yet unreadable, while blackand-white photographs are laminated on wood. It is noteworthy that the item labels have the same format as the photographic exhibits. They are embossed square surfaces with printed text laminated on them. Along with the other museum items, they are embedded in assigned niches as part of the museum’s interior. One question that arises is as follows: how are we to understand the enduring quality (based on the example of the Second World War exhibition) and repetition (based on the example of the exhibition dedicated to the 1992–1995 war) of the Yugoslav language of museology in the extremely ethnonationalist-inclined political climate of Republika Srpska? Is the dating museological matrix restaged in the case of the Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle exhibition and applied to the creation of a new display in the memorial room—a (curatorial) gesture of sorts? If so, what are the repercussions of this act for the historical revision of events that occurred during the Second World War? The museum exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle can be observed today as a heterotopic “object of knowledge” (Foucault 1986) that belongs to both the past and the present. Since the curatorial discourse continues to exist undisturbed, this exhibition does not inform us simply about the historical period of the People’s Liberation Struggle in Foˇca; in fact, it tells us something even more important. It provokes one to reflect on museum language, i.e., on the curatorial discourses used to create politically acceptable images in the Second Yugoslavia. However, the exhibition is not restaged to enable visitors to reconstruct the museum media as instruments of knowledge production, that is, to deconstruct the Yugoslav, patriotically correct image linked to the Second World War. In

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fact, the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle is reinstated as a prelude to the exhibition that follows it—the exhibition Memorial Room Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers and Civilian Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War. From the perspective of the end of Yugoslavia, this could be read as a cynical, pejorative glance back at the Yugoslav zeitgeist, which this exhibition as a “time capsule” should provide us with. This claim becomes clear when the visitor is confronted with the introductory and core units of both exhibitions, alongside the curatorial guidance. All this helps the visitor to unravel a red thread that spans the narratives of both exhibitions. The opening information panel of the permanent museum exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle provides a concise overview of the historical events that occurred during the 101 days of the Foˇca Republic: ˇ In the first half of 1942, after the liberation of Foˇca, Goražde, Cajniˇ ca, and other places at the crossroads between Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro, a free territory was created of great military and political importance for the further development of the People’s Liberation Struggle in this region and in neighboring areas. This created a strong center for the rebellion in the country, where the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Partisan and Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia managed and heavily influenced the further development of the People’s Liberation Movement in Yugoslavia. This disabled the Chetnik Movement in crushing the rebellion forces and preventing mass crimes against the Muslim population. On January 25, 1942, the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation War and the Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia arrived along with Tito in Foˇca. Soon after, a series of major and very important measures were passed to strengthen the success and the gains that helped the People’s Liberation Struggle to develop more intensively. After the founding of the First Proletarian People’s Liberation Brigade in Rudo on December 21, 1941, other mobile and effective military units – brigades and an attack battalion – were formed, the organization and command system was improved, the territorial military support authorities were formed, comprehensive political action was taken to explain the goals of the People’s Liberation War, brotherhood and unity among our nations and nationalities were further developed, and a major step was taken in organizing a new revolutionary people’s government across the country.37

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This panel is followed by two military maps, one of which demonstrates the Partisan detachments in late 1941, and the second of which displays the state of the various war fronts in Europe in late 1941. Bearing in mind that no exhibition catalog exists, the museum guide explained the introductory installation as follows: Because Foˇca – after the April collapse38 of the Army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – belonged to the Italian occupation zone, as part of the Independent State of Croatia, which immediately began to conduct its genocidal plan against the Serbian population, a general Serbian uprising started. Foˇca is an agrarian area, so any working-class consciousness was at a low level; it is a patriarchal place – the population was nationalistically oriented. The mood was immediately clear concerning Muslims; prominent Muslims sent a telegram greeting the new state of Independent Croatia and announced their pro-Ustashe support. This was not the case everywhere – there were exceptions – those who actively participated in the People’s Liberation War. But at the very beginning when the Ustashe government was established, the Ustashe commissioner for Foˇca was Hamid Mufti´c.39

According to the curator, the Serbian people in Foˇca did not want to fight under the five-pointed star. One feature of the Foˇca Republic was that the Partisan Movement had not yet developed in that period; there was still key cooperation with nationalists, i.e., between the Yugoslav Royal Army in the Homeland and the Partisan movement. In Foˇca, the Communist Party accepted these nationalists, the Serbian detachments, and called them the Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia. Unlike the Partisans, their symbol was the tricolor (a blue, white, and red flag), which were either Yugoslav or Serbian symbols. The Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia, as they called themselves, did not have any military combat value because they consisted mostly of local peasants who understood the danger of the Ustashe and Germans, but who did not want to fight as part of proletarian brigades that had been ideologically prepared to fight for the communist idea.40 “However,” the curator concluded, “this exhibition depicts the Partisan Movement homogeneously because the Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia was under its command and had accepted the communist leadership.”41

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Understanding “heritage as a verb” (Harvey 2001, p. 327)—i.e., putting the curator’s voice on a par with the museum exhibits and written descriptions—can help with understanding the Museum of Old Herzegovina as an event “where society and time meet and link in a defined space” (Maroevi´c 1995, p. 30). To reveal how the museum guides the visitor’s gaze, it is necessary to consider the introductory description from the neighboring exhibition in the memorial room: After the communist government had been established, all democratic parties vanished from the political scene, and this new oligarchy had a prominently anti-Serbian character. For Serbs, these conditions were much harder than when they had been occupied by the great empires. When the communist dictatorship was crushed, other nations moved openly toward creating their own national states. Multiparty conditions created a space for the democratic organization of Serbs. The goal of the Serbs from the west of the Drina was the survival of Yugoslavia, as a state in which all Serbs had lived. The Serbian defense had little chance of defending the country because the main influencing factors in the international community were on the side of the secessionists. In these circumstances, those defending the right to national unity, such as the Serb Democratic Party [Srpska demokratska stranka, SDS] formed in Croatia, and then in the former Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbs brought together by the SDS proclaimed a Serbian constitutional and state-building right in the republics in which they were constituent members. On the territory of the Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia, the Serbs created the Republic of Serbian Krajina on their historically claimed territory. In BiH where the SDS organized a referendum (a plebiscite), the entire Serbian population had declared its desire to remain in Yugoslavia, thus founding the Assembly of the Serbian People and proclaiming the existence of Republika Srpska. All attempts to avoid going to war failed because of the advice given to start war against the Serbs, which some major powers gave to the Muslim side. Almost the entire international community was either actively or passively involved in the war, starting with sanctions, bombing, and direct military intervention. The still fresh memories of the massacres during the Second World War, the unlamented and unsanctified cemeteries, the suffering that the indifferent world had not truly noticed, not to mention remembered or condemned, forced the Serbian people into a situation wherein they elected new leaders committed to an idea of nationality.42

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The curatorial guided tours thus intentionally recontextualize the narrative of the restaged Second World War exhibition. The exhibition’s new purpose is to convey the linear progression of historical events: from the mass killing of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War, and on to “the anti-Serbian character” of the communist government in Yugoslavia,43 up to the moment when, paraphrasing the curator, “Yugoslavia fell apart and Serbs defended Yugoslavia – as a state in which all Serbs lived in one state – from the secessionists.”44 The identical design of both exhibitions merges the three-dimensional museum stories presented in separate rooms into one museum reality. This is even more evident when comparing the two exhibitions’ central installations. The core installation of the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle consists of three elements: a portrait of Moša Pijade (the author of the Foˇca regulations; oil on canvas, by an unknown artist), a bronze bust of Josip Broz Tito (the supreme commander; made by the sculptor Antun Augustinˇci´c), and—in between these two works of art—excerpts from the Foˇca regulations (Figs. 6.10 and 6.11). Similarly, the symbols that reflect the development of Republika Srpska are located centrally in the neighboring exhibition under the slogan

Fig. 6.10 Central installation of the exhibition Foˇca in the People’s Liberation Struggle (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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Fig. 6.11 Central installation of the exhibition Memorial Room Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers and Civilian Victims of the Defensive Patriotic War (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

“Long Live Republika Srpska.” The coat of arms stands above the slogan, while there are flags on the left- and right-hand sides of it. On the shelves below there is a document entitled the Constitution of Republika Srpska, medals and various newspapers (e.g., Srpski borac) and books (Luka Cicmil’s Bokori smrti, Momir Krsmanovi´c’s I Bog je zaplakao nad Bosnom etc.) that were published at the end of the war in Foˇca. The Yugoslav exhibition’s methodology has also been implemented as part of the memorial room exhibition’s framework. The use of such a black-and-white historical framework reflects the complete negation of a Bosnian Serb role in the war crimes committed against the opposing side in the nineties wars. Equally, it reflects the building of a mythical relationship with the heroic sacrifice offered on the homeland’s “altar.” The aesthetic and political effects of the continuities between the Second World War exhibition and the memorial room lies in the affirmation of the historical chronology of the two wars (1941–1945 and 1992–1995) as the legitimizing ideological stronghold for the formation of Republika Srpska.

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Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session The Second Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia Session was held in a building opened in 1935 as a Sokol Community Center (a space for physical exercise and youth education in the spirit of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s integrative Yugoslavism). In the early war period and under the guise of sporting activities, groups led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia also gathered in the Jajce Sokol-society branch (Vojinovi´c 1973, p. 6). The wartime history of this building is multifaceted. First, upon occupation, the Ustashe used it as a concentration camp. In 1942 the Partisans liberated Jajce twice. After the Partisans’ second retreat from the town, the building was set on fire. Around the time of the Second AVNOJ Session, the Partisans refurbished it and renamed the building the AVNOJ House. On November 29, 1943, the provisional war parliament, consisting of 142 delegates from all Yugoslav republics except Macedonia (whose representatives were present at the session via radio transmission), used a federal principle to reach key decisions regarding the formation of Yugoslavia. Ðord-e Andrejevi´c Kun created a draft prototype of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia’s coat of arms in gypsum relief, especially for this occasion. It was placed on the AVNOJ stage in the central part, between two Yugoslav flags with five-pointed stars, with the flags tied to form a semicircle. At the center of the coat of arms, there were five torches symbolizing the five peoples of Yugoslavia,45 and an inscription of the date of the Second AVNOJ Session. Besides the symbols of the state-in-the-making, Antun Augustinˇci´c sculpted Josip Broz Tito’s bust; it was placed on the left-hand side close to the speaking platform as a symbol of the leader of the People’s Liberation Movement (Josip Broz Tito was proclaimed marshal on that evening), indicating his taking office as the future president of the Second Yugoslavia. The AVNOJ stage was also used for performances by the Theater of People’s Liberation.46 It was on that very stage, with a red curtain backdrop reminiscent of classical theater, adorned with the slogan “Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People,” in red letters, that the Second Yugoslavia was reified. Consequently, until the 1990s, this building and the town of Jajce were the symbols of the “cradle of Socialist Yugoslavia” (Hadžimuhamedovi´c 2007, p. 269; Radovi´c 2011).

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The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session (hereinafter: AVNOJ Museum) opened on November 29, 1953, which was the tenth anniversary of the historically and politically important date of the Second AVNOJ Session. The decision was made by the Committee for the Planning and Maintenance of Places of Importance to the People’s Liberation Struggle and Revolution, linked to the Association of the People’s Liberation War Fighters’ Central Committee. The first exhibition consisted of a rough reconstruction of the AVNOJ stage and a panel exhibiting “177 photographs and 179 documents arranged by Emil Viˇci´c” (Bešli´c 1958, p. 76), thus offering a comprehensive illustration of the Second World War. Yugoslavia’s political leadership, which included numerous councilors from 1943, headed by President Josip Broz Tito, attended the museum opening. Josip Broz Tito was one of several people who addressed the attendees. Moša Pijade delivered a speech titled On the Development of the New Yugoslavia Based on the Historical Decisions of the Second AVNOJ Session (Pijade 1958, p. 76). The theme of emphasizing the contemporary importance of the decisions reached the AVNOJ session reappeared year in, year out, on November 29, as reiterated by participants in the Solemn Ceremony (Sveˇcana Akademija) as the most prominent Republic Day commemoration event at the AVNOJ Museum. The preparation of documentation for adapting the AVNOJ Museum started barely three years after it opened. The main conjecture was that the AVNOJ Museum was supposed to convey the atmosphere of the 1943 session and thus serve as a stage for commemorating Republic Day. The new thematic plan outlining the designs (tematsko-ekspozicioni plan) was completed in 197147 (Figs. 6.12 and 6.13). This was also an opportunity to come to an agreement and to adapt the Small Hall used to screen documentary films and temporary exhibitions at a later point. The Central Board of the Fighters’ Alliance and the Board for Marking and Regulating Historical Places approved its financing, and they also formed the Committee for the Adaptation of the Museum Display. According to this committee, the primary goal of the new concept and renovation should be to make it possible for AVNOJ Museum visitors to fully experience that fateful historical night when our socialist parliament was created and where the foundations of our republic were set, as well as the fundamentals of socialist

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Fig. 6.12 Opening of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, 1953 (Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Yugoslavia. Photo © Museum of Yugoslavia)

parliamentarism in general. (Komisija za negovanje revolucionarnih tradicija NOR-a. n.d. Dokumentacija o izgradnji memorijalnog Muzeja Drugog zasjedanja AVNOJ-a, 1956–1971. Archive of Yugoslavia, fond 297, folder 102)

To achieve this goal, the chronological limits of the museum exhibition were altered. The decision made was to reconstruct the hall—in the most complete and precise way—in which the AVNOJ session had been held, despite their lacking the original inventory. This meant that the hall had to be reconstructed as convincingly as possible. Its appearance should resemble how it looked on November 29, 1943, as closely as possible. Besides the paintings by Ðord-e Andrejevi´c Kun (portraits of Marx, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) and Ismet Mujezinovi´c (Tito’s portrait), the surroundings of the Second AVNOJ Session hall were described as follows:

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Fig. 6.13 Commemorating November 29 at the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, 1968 (Reproduced with the permission of the Museum of Yugoslavia. Photo © Museum of Yugoslavia)

Two long tables were set on the stage in a line and covered with a red canvas, with eight simple wooden chairs in one row. There was a decorative backdrop surrounding the table and a prototype of the FNRJ coat of arms at the back of the stage, made in Jajce by the painter Kun and sculptor Augustinˇci´c. There was a podium at the front of the stage beside the prompt box, and you could leave the stage from the podium via the three wooden steps. There was an ordinary table with a speaker’s stand on the podium, and a second stand with Tito’s bust, sculpted by Augustinˇci´c, behind the speaker. A common Bosnian kilim (a flat decorative rug) partly covered the floor in front of the rostrum and adorned

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the podium. The stage also included a light sign with the parole “Death to Fascism – Freedom to the People,” and the slogan “Long Live the Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia” in front of it. On the wall, looking toward the river, was the slogan “Long Live the Red Army,” and “Long Live our Heroic People’s Liberation Army” was visible on the balcony’s railing. The main hall was designated for the delegates, and the balcony for the guests. In front of the rostrum in the hall there were rows of chairs of different shapes and kinds for the session delegates, such as could be found in Jajce at that time. There were several armchairs in the first row, one of which was designated for Tito. Another kilim, also Bosnian, was placed on the railing of the hall’s balcony, as well as several flags and paintings, both domestic and of the Allies, and this decorated the interior.48

At the end of the war all the furniture from the historic session was burned and the whole inventory—except for Tito’s and two other side armchairs—owned by the museum, including Tito’s bust, were replicas. This thus led to the decision to produce replicas of the furniture and to collect many smaller original objects that belonged to the councilors during the session, such as bags, notebooks, sketches, writings, and pens, all of which were used to enhance the permanent display. Artificial lighting was also introduced to the permanent display and the windows were darkened to simulate the nighttime atmosphere when the Second AVNOJ Session was held. On the ground floor, where there had previously been panels with photographs, there were rows of chairs to illustrate the scene present on November 29, 1943. Each chair had a small plaque with the name of the councilor that had been seated there. Besides reconstructing the hall, the committee stated the necessity of including a brief introduction to the battles on Neretva and Sutjeska (which included maps of the progress of the revolution and the situation in Europe throughout the war), all of which led to the Second AVNOJ Session. The exhibition was designed to end with the Third AVNOJ Session, held in Belgrade in 1945. The committee decided to erase Milovan Ðilas49 from the photographs exhibited in the museum (i.e., retouch his image). Between 1956 and 1971 there were three proposals for adapting the permanent display. In 1977, following many consultations with witnesses of the Second AVNOJ Session, the committee adopted the (final) proposal composed by the Institute for Architecture and Urbanization of the Architectural-Urbanization Faculty in Sarajevo,

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titled the Investment Program of the Museum Display Refurbishment and Adaptation.50 During the whirlwinds of the nineties wars, the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session was attacked by all three warring parties (Nikoli´c 2013, p. 22). The whole archival inventory of the museum vanished, and so today there is not a single photograph displaying the museum’s appearance after 1977. Nothing remains of the former museum photographic laboratory either.51 The museum collection also suffered during the war years. The original exhibit pieces—Tito’s armchair and two side armchairs, as well as all the portraits that hung on the side walls (except for those of Engels and Lenin)—were preserved because they were hidden in a Franciscan monastery. According to the director of the museum, Emsada Leko, before the war, the AVNOJ Museum held: 10,000 books, over one hundred films, ninety-six magnetophonon reel-to-reel tape recordings, 846 artworks (paintings, graphics, drawings, and several busts), a collection of trophy weapons, and a unique collection of gold and silver coins issued by the SFRJ National Bank from 1945 onwards, of which one has been donated to the museum. (Guši´c 2014)

Today, the museum library has a collection of 3,000 books. In 2012 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Banja Luka returned a series of 293 drawings by the artist Božidar Jakac, titled The Road to Jajce. Thanks to the work of the Jajce-based NGOs, the Society for the Protection of Cultural-Historical and Natural Values and the Association “Josip Broz Tito,” most of the old collection was retrieved in 2004 when NGO workers entered the ruined museum and started the process of cleaning it and creating an inventory. Not long after, Enes Milak, a historian from Jajce, established the Board for the Renewal of the Museum, which, besides supporting the above NGOs, was also backed by the NGOs that inherited the former Yugoslav Alliance of Veterans of the People’s Liberation War (Savez boraca Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata – hereinafter: SUBNOR), as well as other interested individuals (Nikoli´c 2012, pp. 195–98). First, they raised the funds needed to renovate the building, backed by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Main Board of the Slovenian SUBNOR branch. This was followed by financial support accumulated to renovate the museum

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display. It was sourced from the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Ministry of Culture and Education of Republika Srpska, the Ministry for Spatial Planning of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Montenegrin Government, the Jajce Municipality and various individuals from all the former Yugoslav republics.52 Thus, in 2007 the preconditions were met to officially establish the public institution—the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session (whose founder was the municipal council of Jajce). In the same year, Nataša Matauši´c, the curator at the Croatian History Museum, gave a conceptual summary of the museum’s new permanent display. It consisted of nine thematic units: 1. Basic features and distinctive characteristics of the antifascist movement in Yugoslavia, in relation to other countries’ antifascist movements (the defined aims of battle, battle methods, and the numerous organizational forms) 2. Map of Yugoslavia with marked sites and dates of rebellions for each republic 3. Map of Yugoslavia with the marked sites and dates of the formation of the first people’s liberation committees and national antifascist councils of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia, and the Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (Biha´c, November 26–27, 1942) 4. Map of Yugoslavia—territory under the control of Partisan units, conditions in November 1943 5. Jajce: photograph (postcard) with a succinct description of the town’s history 6. Frieze photograph of the Second AVNOJ Session: the appearance of the hall, moments of the session, participants, representatives of the Allied armies 7. Decisions made at the Second AVNOJ Session 8. Contemporary domestic and foreign press covering the Second AVNOJ Session 9. The Allies’ relationship with the AVNOJ decisions.53 Besides the listed elements, Matauši´c stated that the renovated setting recreating the AVNOJ stage should reflect the setting of the AVNOJ

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Museum in Yugoslavia, which implied that, based on historical photographs of the Second AVNOJ Session, they had to reproduce replicas of all the furniture, objects, and slogans hanging on the walls. However, Matauši´c’s proposal was not adopted in its entirety. For instance, despite her disapproval, a Styrofoam sculpture of Josip Broz Tito was placed on the AVNOJ stage (a replica of Augustinˇci´c’s sculpture), which Enes Milak had received from a local theater where it had served as a theater prop. Also, the form in which the AVNOJ decisions were supposed to be laid out with a conceptual summary was also disregarded. The exposé by Matauši´c states: Each decision should be exhibited in its original form, enlarged to suit easy and clear reading. The description should place an emphasis on the meaning of each decision at the given moment and what remains of it today. For instance, the decision on building Yugoslavia with a federal principle originated from the ‘right of each people to self-determination, including the right to secession.’ This was supposed to ensure the full equality of all peoples in the new Yugoslavia (in contrast with the Greater Serbia hegemony of the old). Based on this very decision, after 1991 certain Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia, etc.) proclaimed their independence.

In spite of Matauši´c’s intention to bring the AVNOJ decisions into dialog with Badinter’s 1991 Arbitration Commission, in which she partially succeeded (Šahovi´c and Zulumovi´c 2012), the AVNOJ decisions were exhibited on permanent display in their original form, on A4 sheets of paper that are highly illegible (fading letters on a yellow background). Furthermore, they were placed on several shelves in a dark corner. Besides Nataša Matauši´c’s intervention in the thematic plan and outline, the board adopted the proposal made by representatives of SUBNOR successor organizations, wherein each successor state should have its own museum niche. It was decided that the SUBNOR organization for each former Yugoslav state, respectively, should decide on how to arrange the display cases and panels for its republic, while the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina should musealize the central AVNOJ stage. Enes Milak applied for copies of archival materials from the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and from the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.

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Finally, the new permanent display shifted its focus from the birth of Yugoslavia to its death, and from Yugoslavia’s whole to its parts (Tepavˇcevi´c 2013, p. 21). The idea to nevertheless emphasize the AVNOJ decisions as the roots of the development of statehood for the successor states was achieved by exhibiting the six monumental panels of the six Yugoslav successor states (Jagdhuhn 2016) (Figs. 6.14 and 6.15). The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session is the only renovated People’s Liberation Struggle museum for which the authors of the new exhibition were not excluded from the state in which the institution is located. It is a unique example of a museum display that integrates all the main languages spoken in the former Yugoslav area. Each panel, besides being written in the official language of the state, was also translated into English. A list of pavilion authors’ names was never published.54 What is certain is that there was no “supreme body” that could influence how the successor SUBNOR organizations from the former Yugoslav republics chose to tackle the task of presenting the roots of the successor Yugoslav states’ statehood. The SUBNOR organizations’ stories were joined together by an “umbrella,” i.e., a unifying design made by Mojca

Fig. 6.14 Central AVNOJ Stage (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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Fig. 6.15 View of the rear museum “pavilions” of Yugoslavia’s respective successor states (Photo 2015 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

Turk from Slovenia. What is particularly interesting in the reconceptualization of the AVNOJ Museum is how the representatives of antifascist associations tackled the task of presenting the roots of statehood by creating “pavilions” for Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.55 Thus the question arises: to what extent does the museological and historical presentation of these three states differ? And does it complement the curatorial strategies used with respect to the renewal of Second World War memorial museums in these states? The Bosnia and Herzegovina pavilion offers a summary of “one thousand years of the state and legal development of Bosnia and Herzegovina,”56 from its first mention in historical sources in the mid-tenth century and the twelfth century, until April 6, 1992, when the European Union states recognized the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign, self-governing, and independent state, and as an equal member of the international community. It is noteworthy that the Bosnian Herzegovinian panels state that before the Second World War, “Bosnia and Herzegovina were increasingly considered as a space for their neighbors to spread their own ideas of a greater state.” As the text suggests,

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this is precisely why Bosnia and Herzegovina became part of the fascist NDH formation during the Second World War. In such “difficult and also complicated circumstances of national and religious separatism,” the war against fascism broke out, which—with a special emphasis in the text—“assembled all the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” This introduction, describing the historical and political circumstances that led to the Second World War, takes up one-third of the Bosnia and Herzegovina panel; the remaining two-thirds focus on the history of the Second World War in the region. The conclusion underlines how the far-reaching nature of the ZAVNOBiH decisions was also reflected in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s international recognition in 1992. Like the Bosnia and Herzegovina pavilion, the genealogy of Croatian statehood is presented with the same proportion of text devoted to each historical period, with two-thirds of it focused on Second World War history. Yet, unlike Bosnia and Herzegovina’s “one-thousand-year section,” the history of Croatian statehood does not reach that far back into the past. The museum narrative takes the breakup of Yugoslavia as its starting point, before moving backward to tell the history of the Second World War. The introduction begins by stating that “there is no firm consensus on the causes of the SFRJ’s breakup and the date when this process started and ended.” However, the following lines claim that “after Serbian aggression against Croatia and the failure to resolve the Yugoslav crisis, the Croatian parliament unanimously reached the decision to break all state and legal ties of the Republic of Croatia with the rest of the SFRJ republics and provinces.” By underpinning the link between AVNOJ decisions and Croatia’s independence, the text asserts that based on the January 1992 Badinter Commission’s conclusions, the borders between the former federal units (AVNOJ borders) have become the state borders of the successors. Additionally, the introduction also highlights that “the preamble, however, of the Republic of Croatia’s constitution, dated December 22, 1990, bases the historical right of the Croatian people to full state sovereignty also on the Second World War period, that is, on the decisions of the People’s Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Croatia (1943).” In contrast to the Croatian and Bosnian Herzegovinian museum pavilion, the Serbian pavilion is dedicated completely to Second World War history on the territory of Serbia. While the first two-thirds of the panel text offers a historical summary of important Second World War

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events, the last third deals with the structuring of a “people’s government” during the Second World War. The exposé further reveals the detail that twenty-four delegates from Serbia participated in the Second AVNOJ Session, and they “underscored that the Serbian people or Serbia have nothing in common with those who have fled the country, betrayed the people, and organized the fratricidal war.” The conclusion states that it was not until the. decision of the Third AVNOJ Session in August 1945 that the process of building Serbia ended, as a multifaceted federal unit that included two autonomous units, the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and the autonomous regions of Kosovo and Metohija, which was confirmed at the beginning of 1946 in the constitution of Yugoslavia and Serbia.

The descriptions of the museum pavilions for Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia illustrate three vastly different perspectives on the Second World War when compared with all the Second World War-related museums in the respective states. The Bosnian Herzegovinian and Croatian pavilions offer a unique example of a comprehensive Second World War history that does not feature in any other museum on these territories. This is particularly notable in Bosnia and Herzegovina because the political divisions along entity lines obstruct the creation of an integrated museological and historical presentation of the Second World War. For the Republic of Croatia, this is because there are very few Second World War memorial exhibitions that are still working. As the museum departments or museums that dealt with the military and political meetings of the Second World War (e.g., the Museum of the First ZAVNOBiH Session in Mrkonji´c Grad, Bosnia and Herzegovina; the Historical Collection of the First ZAVNOH Session in Otoˇcac, Croatia; the Museum “4 May” in Belgrade, Serbia) are no longer working, this is the only place in which these political and historical events have regained their historical importance. Interestingly, not only were the important decisions at meetings such as the ZAVNOH sessions tackled—there were also photographs of the buildings in which the meetings of the People’s Liberation Struggle leadership from the various territories took place in each respective pavilion. Indeed, these meetings were decisive in organizing the antifascist retaliation in various Yugoslav republics during the Second World War.

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In the Bosnian Herzegovinian section there is a photograph of the building in which “the First ZAVNOBiH Session in Mrkonji´c Grad was held on November 25 and 26, 1943.” The Croatian pavilion offers a photograph of a “house in the village of Ponori where the ZAVNOH Steering Committee was founded.” The Serbian section includes a photograph with the caption “Ribnikar villa in Belgrade, where on July 4, 1941, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Centralni Komitet Komunistiˇcke Partije Jugoslavije—CKKPJ) politburo reached the decision to start the resistance of the peoples of Yugoslavia.” The most obvious difference in Serbia’s presentation of Second World War history in its pavilion compared with presentations of this period in Second World War memorial museums in Serbia is that the framework of the AVNOJ Museum explicitly mentions that the People’s Liberation Movement in the only antifascist organization and marks the Chetnik Movement as collaborationist. The redesigned AVNOJ museum display (including the pavilions) is characterized by an absence of curatorial gesture and in that sense an absence of a vision of the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina (von Puttkamer 2016). This museum is thus genuinely a kind of remnant of the memorial politics and discourses created and nurtured in Yugoslavia and has been revived through the joint efforts of antifascist associations from all parts of the former Yugoslavia. It is these people who also comprise most of the visitors or producers at the event Days of AVNOJ (a public ceremony established on November 29, 2008, with the reopening of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session). Through different props, music, and especially the speeches delivered from the AVNOJ stage on November 29, they embody the last vestiges of Yugoslavism (Jagdhuhn 2017).

Serbia: The Museum “21 October” The Kragujevac massacre that occurred between October 19 and 21, 1941, was one of the top priorities for the memorialization of Second World War events in Yugoslavia. This is clear from the fact that a commemoration of the victims of the German reprisal was held in 1944 and alongside Tito’s visit to Šumarice on October 21, 1945,57 it is one of the earliest events of its kind organized in Yugoslavia (Joki´c 1985, p. 15). Already by then, i.e., immediately before and at the end of the war, the

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focus shifted to the most appropriate ways of memorializing the victims of Kragujevac.58 In the early 1950s, due to attempts to find more suitable ways of implementing memorial practices, Yugoslav memorial politics shifted from a Soviet model toward the West in its efforts to find its own “third” way between the two hegemonic systems of war representation. The memorial park concept came from the USA as an idea for replacing the gloomy cemetery atmosphere with a pleasant walking area for families of the victims, the public, and the overall a top politically generated community. It was designed as a specific horticultural and natural environment filled with sculptural forms, located on the site of a historical event. The committee for building the Memorial Park “October in Kragujevac” finetuned this originally US idea (the park was designed by the architects Mihajlo Mitrovi´c, Radivoje Tomi´c, and Smiljan Klai´c) to suit the Yugoslav memorial discourse. This is clear in an excerpt from the public call for applications: This memorial park should not be a cemetery, even a modern one, nor should it be a monument for victims or to the misdeeds of fascism, but primarily it should be a monument to the heroism and revolutionary quality of the working class; this memorial park should be unique among its kind. As such, it will give strength and inspire. (Martinovi´c 2013, p. 310)

While the memorial park was founded in 1953, the Museum “21 October” opened in 1976. The architects Ivan Anti´c and Ivanka Raspopovi´c created a closed space without windows. This space was shaped like a rectangle with parallel pipes of different sizes, covered with glass domes that were the only source of lighting. The architectural plan’s symbolism should be understood, as the authors have often stressed (Mitrovi´c 2012), in terms of the sense of fear and hope a person feels when awaiting execution. This sense materializes in a “bottom of the well” metaphor in which the visitor is placed by their entering a dark space with a high ceiling. Besides creating a feeling of anxiety, it is also reminiscent of a church; the light that enters from the top of the dome generates a spiritual state among the visitors. Colonel Dušan Plenˇca, who worked as a curator at the Military Museum in Belgrade at the time, is the author of the permanent exhibition from the Yugoslav period. According to Nenad Ðord-evi´c, coauthor59 of the new exhibition concept that was implemented in 2003, the two

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main problems with the Yugoslav exhibition are that 1) the Kragujevac victims of 1941 are presented as “victims of the revolution,” and 2) the number of victims has been rounded to 7,000.60 The longtime curator Staniša Brki´c, who is also one of the coauthors of the new permanent display, reached the conclusion that the most precise figure for the number of victims executed between October 19 and 21 was 2,792, and this figure was integrated into the new museum display (Brki´c 2007). The list of the victims’ names was exhibited as part of the Yugoslav permanent display; the names were cut into the walls with one brick for one name. However, they were presented at the time as the “names and surnames of those for whom it is certain that they were murdered” (Joki´c 1985, p. 17). The tendency to overestimate the number of victims in Yugoslavia functioned as a legitimizing construct for the new government, and this tendency is obvious in the image that the Museum “21 October” had in Yugoslavia. Eight thematic units made up the permanent museum display: “KPJ in Serbia 1941,” “At the Dawn of the Uprising: “KPJ in Serbia 1941,” “Kragujevac Before the Uprising,” “The Hot Summer in Šumadija,” “Reckless Retribution,” “War Without Mercy,” “United in Crime” and “Stronger Than Death” (Joki´c 1985, p. 16). The Yugoslav exhibition remained silent on the Chetnik and Partisan joint resistance against German units, which was the direct motive for the Wehrmacht’s retributive act. Consequently, key changes introduced in the new museum display include the breaking of the taboo surrounding the figure of 7,000 victims and the demonstration of the fact that there were skirmishes between German and Chetnik units prior to the Partisan shooting. Besides the two key motifs in the permanent display’s transformation, the curators decided that the new exhibition would concentrate exclusively on the execution without considering the wider historical context, the latter being standard practice in NOB museums in Yugoslavia. This shift should be interpreted primarily in light of the decision to “cleanse” the exhibition of elements that directly referred to KPJ history (Pešterac 2017, p. 82). Decommunization was implemented not only in the permanent display on the first floor but also in the reorganization of the ground-floor exhibition area, which—according to Plenˇca’s concept—included the following thematic parts: “City in Revolt,” “First Socialist Ideas,” “Red Flag,” “The Social Democratic Party in Kragujevac,” “Repression of the Bourgeoisie,” “The Creation and Development

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of the Trade Union Movement in Kragujevac,” “KPJ Vanguard of the Working Classes of Kragujevac,” and “Kragujevac is Preparing.”61 Today, not one of these listed parts of the museum has been preserved. What has been preserved, however, is Petar Lubarda’s series of paintings, Kragujevac 1941. This was a commissioned work created between 1966 and 1968 for the museum (and donated in 1969). Just as during Yugoslavia, these works are now located on the ground floor as part of an introduction to the exhibition on the historical events that occurred between October 19 and 21, 1941. In his signed testament, which has become a museum exhibit piece in the new permanent exhibition, Lubarda bequeathed the series of paintings to the museum, requesting that the paintings never be exhibited anywhere else. Just like the decision to build the memorial park at the beginning of the 1950s, the “memorial art” phenomenon—with Lubarda as one of its key members—should be understood in the historical and political context in which the Yugoslavia of the 1960s wished to be represented. Socialist modernism, as the official aesthetic language that Yugoslavia relied upon in representing its specific “nonaligned” position, served the function of sentimentally evoking memories of a historic moment that was not contextualized but instead transformed into symbols oriented toward the future. However, in the new permanent exhibition, between Lubarda’s twenty-seven canvases and the start of the semicircular staircase that leads to the central display dedicated to the 1941 massacre in Kragujevac, a photo portrait of Nikola Tesla has been placed alongside his statement about the 1941 tragedy in Kragujevac: Our people show such moral strength that they are lighting our faces before the world. What our brothers in the Old Country are doing is in the spirit that pervades our folk song. Such spiritual strength, firmness of will, resoluteness and heroism were shown by our underdeveloped boys when they joyfully cried in front of the German guns: “We are Serbian children. Shoot!” How we can all be proud knowing that in all of the history of the world there is not a magnificent example of equal merit. These beautiful martyrs will live through the centuries in our memory, delighting us towards immortal deeds. New York, April 1942, your brother Nikola Tesla

By catching the space between the objects as an approach to reinventing the past (van Mensch 2011), a question emerges: how do Lubarda’s “pictorial novel” and Tesla’s statement—articulated in two completely

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different “discursive regimes” (Foucault 1980)—communicate a message in the museum exhibition? Before entering the part of the museum dedicated to the Kragujevac tragedy of 1941, visitors encounter two different modes of evaluating historical events: the Yugoslav socialist modernist system of representation (embodied in Lubarda’s modernist, epic, and signature style) and the system of national cultural representation in patriotic discourse (expressed in Tesla’s statement). The shift in focus from Yugoslav supranational to Serbian national history, with a special emphasis placed on the Kragujevac district, reflects the first two rectangular information panels in the new permanent display. The first panel consists of a collage of textual and photographic information on the city of Kragujevac from 1476—when the city is first mentioned as the name of a square in a Turkish historical source—until the nineteenth century. The information chosen for the introductory text is entirely affirmative: The village of Kragujevac in medieval times became a town during Ottoman rule, and with Knez Miloš Obrenovi´c’s decree it became the first capital of the renewed Serbia (1818–1841). In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was the center of political, economic, social, and cultural development. Artisan skills, trade, and the first industrial production developed thanks to its status as a capital. Kragujevac was where the first cultural and educational institutions were established and started working.

The current curator Jelena Davidovi´c emphasizes that this part of the exhibition is dedicated especially to tourists, who, besides showing an interest in the historical events the museum deals with, also want to learn about the history of the city of Kragujevac.62 Considering that in Yugoslavia the Museum “21 October” had the status of being a republiclevel institution, and that it lost that status after the breakup of Yugoslavia and is now financed by the Kragujevac municipality, this type of expansion of the museum display is due to an institutional redefining. The second thematic part is called “Uprising” and it has been designed as a composition of historical materials that testify to the Chetnik and Partisan resistance to the occupational forces. A short introductory text has been placed beneath the title of this part: The German occupational authorities’ reaction to the Partisans’ and Chetniks’ uprising entailed massive repercussions. Kragujevac was one of the main locations for this retaliation. How it was executed, the kind of people

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who were killed, and – based on later reactions – the killing in the historical center of Šumadija assumed a special place in folk memory.

The cited text, which serves as an introduction, offers insight into the historical context of the “Uprising,” and it does not cohere with the material exhibited on the panel. One question has been avoided: why were there two resistance movements in 1941 on the territory of Serbia in the war-torn Kingdom of Yugoslavia? Instead of historically contextualizing the topic of resistance, as the panel title suggests, the visitor is offered an empty observation: “German reprisals were a response to the insurgent actions of the Chetniks and Partisans.” Precisely how the historical materials correspond to the text on this panel merely proves the narrative void. Its central content consists of photographs by Zvonimir Vuˇckovi´c, the commander of the Takovo-based Chetnik detachment, and photographs by Radisav Nedeljkovi´c Raja, the commander of the Kragujevac Partisan detachment. There is also an excerpt from a document that evidences a local agreement between the Partisans and Chetniks near Kragujevac (concluded on October 13, 1941). In addition, there is a photograph that shows Chetniks in the village of Planinica leading captured German soldiers who were caught in the Chetnik and Partisan attack on Gornji Milanovac on September 29, 1941. The remainder of the photographic and archival documents serve to offer proof of this Chetnik–Partisan action. They include photographs of a destroyed German tank on the road from Gornji Milanovac to Kragujevac, killed German soldiers and their funeral, and two exhibited documents: 1) a copy of the Kragujevac Partisan detachment, dated October 18, 1941, which claims that the Partisans and Chetniks joined forces to attack German soldiers; and 2) the document of the German order to the command of the 717th Division, 3rd Battalion, 749th Regiment, authorizing the third attack on Gornji Milanovac. The above-described content of the “Uprising” thematic unit is crucial to the new display and to changes made to the preceding one. It reflects the exhibition authors’ clear intent to expose facts regarding joint resistance by the Chetnik and Partisan movements in the fall of 1941—facts that were concealed in Yugoslavia. However, the historical contextualization of this collaboration, and especially the goals and wartime actions of the Chetnik and Partisan movements before and after this event, have been left out. Furthermore, the zig-zag alignment of the thematic units (as dictated by the architectural style of the museum towers) composed

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of archival documents and photographs, without their offering a critical review or multivocality, create a black-and-white posterized image of the war year 1941 (Fig. 6.16). The Serbian occupational government’s responsibility is mentioned in just one place, in a sole sentence that refers to Dimitrije Ljoti´c: “Members of the military formation volunteer regiments of his movement took part in Kragujevac reprisal operations in October 1941.” This sentence is part of the overall dramatic composition underpinning the exhibition’s third thematic unit titled “The April War.” This unit consists of two maps (Territories Affected by the Uprising in September 1941 and The Division of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the April War of 1941) and portraits of the protagonists and antagonists, which as the curator Jelena Davidovi´c points out, “are important for understanding the historical event of the 1941 execution in Kragujevac.”63 Most of this thematic unit is dedicated to General Franz Böhme, commander of the German troops in Serbia in the fall of 1941, who ordered the arrest and subsequent executions as a reprisal for the ten killed and twenty-six wounded German soldiers (at a 1:100 ratio for killed German soldiers, and a 1:50 ratio for the wounded). This highlights that his role and responsibility in the Hostages Case (as

Fig. 6.16 The panel “April War in 1941” (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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the Nuremberg court called the trial of the war crime committed in 1941 in Kragujevac, among others) was crucial. The portraits of Josip Broz Tito (commander of the Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia and Secretary General of the CK KPJ) and Dragoljub Draža Mihajlovi´c (chief of the Supreme Command Staff of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland and leader of the Ravna Gora Movement) can be found beside each other, on the same board and the same size. This, therefore, aligns with the antioccupational character of the Partisan and Chetnik movements. Beneath the maps and the three protagonists of the occupation and resistance, there is a frieze made up of smaller format photographs that depict the following historical personages: Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the German army’s Supreme Command; Harold Turner, head of the Administrative Staff for the military commander of Serbia; Dimitrije Ljoti´c, founding leader of the Yugoslav People’s Movement “Zbor”; and General Milan Nedi´c, president of the Serbian government under occupation. Unlike Ljoti´c, beside Milan Nedi´c’s name, there is no additional information explaining his role, his political and military responsibilities, and his leadership of the quisling government. Does this exhibition’s silence regarding Milan Nedi´c’s historical role place this exhibition in the company of those historians advocating the rehabilitation of his character and work? When the writer and translator Ivan Ivanji, who had been incarcerated as a Jew in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was invited in 2011 to open the visiting exhibition The Kragujevac Tragedy of 1941 in the Buchenwald Memorial Center, he was doubtful about taking on such a role because of the contested feelings that some of the Serbian public had toward the historical role of Milan Nedi´c, and he expressed his misgivings in the following manner: They invited me to open the exhibition. And while I was hesitating to accept, I read that in the grammar school (gymnasium) – the one from where they led pupils to be executed – there is a portrait on show of the “renowned pupil” of that old Serbian school, Milan Nedi´c. And furthermore, [I read] that respectable citizens of Kragujevac, also including the director of the October in Kragujevac Memorial Park, Vladimir Jagliˇci´c, think this to be natural. Would anyone in France think it “natural” to display a picture of Marshal Pétain, whom Nedi´c personally supported, in a school? Or Vidkun Quisling in Norway? Jagliˇci´c and other historians

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recognize that Nedi´c is a “controversial character,” unlike Draža Mihajlovi´c who for them is “not controversial.” (Ivanji 2011a)

For Milan Nedi´c as well as Draža Mihajlovi´c, there is no sign depicting them as members of the collaborationist forces in the Museum “21 October.” Upon discussing this with the curator, who holds guided tours of the museum, she said that the Chetnik Movement was also collaborationist, but that the museum display makes no such statement. Just as the museum story had been “cleansed” of negative and inhuman elements present on the Serbian side, so too had all members of the occupying forces been dehumanized and depersonalized, even though there are witness statements regarding sporadic rescue(s) of individual(s) by the occasional German soldier (Ivanji 2011b). Therefore, by selecting historical facts, the new display is no different from the one it had replaced. They share a documentary approach (numerous archival, illegible photocopies) “defending” one, monolithic narrative, led by the idea of patriotism. Yugoslav patriotism forbade the mention of Chetnik units as participants in the resistance, and the new display’s Serbian patriotism has made it impossible to critically revise the role of occupied Serbia’s quisling state apparatus. Such critical revision would include questioning Chetnik’s motives for resistance, collaboration, and more generally their approach to warfare. Just like the People’s Liberation Struggle museums that sprang up based on the Fighters’ Association’s directive, so too has the museological presentation of the Chetnik Movement as a resistance movement in the Second World War been installed in Serbia after the year 2000, in an ad hoc manner and as a political decision that lacks any historical and museological consideration of such an act (Stojˇci´c 2018; Ðureinovi´c 2018; Tamindžija 2018). This statement is illustrated by the fact that after the Democratic Party came to power (2000), the topic of two (antagonistic) resistance movements was dealt with in several different museums in Serbia in a similar, overly simplified, and understated manner. Primarily mosaic-like presentations of leading figures from the Partisan and Chetnik Movement were placed side by side, one with the other, without delving into the historical interpretation of the civil war fought during the Second World War on the territory of Yugoslavia. According to Staniša Brki´c, coauthor of this new display, Chetnik collaboration during the Second World War is not mentioned in the Museum “21 October” because in September 1941 it had not yet

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occurred, and the authors of the exhibition did not want to stray into a wider historical contextualization of the Second World War. Instead, they chose to focus on the date to which the exhibition is dedicated (Brki´c 2011). Therefore, museum visitors are hereby placed in the “museum as theatre” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2015, pp. 49–59) form. By walking through different parts of the exhibition, they are walking through time, that is, through objects and documents that belong exclusively to the time in question, without any “lessons learned” and without offering an overarching narrative of the museum institution itself. The curatorial voice, included only in the introductory panel of “The April War” part without offering a historical explanation, emotionally declares: The military defeat and loss of state independence in the spring of 1941 brought the Serbian people into a very difficult position. The uprising boiled and spread across Serbian ethnic territories, and by the end of August and into September 1941, it turned into a widespread uprising on Serbian soil, under direct German occupation.

As the quotation clearly shows, Yugoslavia’s Partisan struggle is perceived through a Serbian lens as an “uprising [that] boiled and spread across Serbian ethnic territories,” disregarding the fact that the Partisans led a pan-Yugoslav movement. Considering the political context in which the new permanent display was created, after the fall of Miloševi´c and the democratic changes in Serbia, this exhibition reflects that moment of a radical shift in Second World War remembrance politics, when the newly established democratic government decidedly resolved to part ways with symbols of communism, and when the Chetnik Movement started to gain its first conceptual outline in a museum setting. As the Museum “21 October” shows, by unearthing facts that refer to the Chetnik Movement’s resistance in 1941, the process of the “democratization” of museum spaces has expanded the limits of historical knowledge. However, the lack of organized museum collections that would present new curatorial strategies for presenting this theme, as well as a reluctance to contextualize the history of the Chetnik Movement in a wider framework beyond the one created by simply covering given historical events, makes parts of the exhibition dedicated to the “two resistance movements” seem (museologically) unconvincing. The new museum display in Kragujevac—unlike the previous Yugoslav one, which placed the struggle (i.e., the People’s Liberation Struggle and the

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People’s Revolution) over suffering (victims of massacre)—foregrounds victims’ terrorization. The cruelty with which the citizens of Kragujevac were killed, which also included a school class with their teacher, dominates throughout almost all parts of the exhibition. This is visible in a large number of explicit photographs of the executed. Indeed, two panels that also conclude the museum story of the events that took place between October 19 and 21, 1941, consist of black-and-white photographs of graves. This is the assumption that the exhibition Punctum salience by Marko Terzi´c, a curator at the Museum “21 October,” also makes. It was organized on the ground floor of the museum in 2016, and it was composed of excerpts from the guest book. Its aim was to present to the public how visitors have reacted to the new display (since 2001). The visitors’ statements included the following: What happened to the Serbs is too much. Now I would like the same to happen to the Germans. Bojana Krivokapi´c Only a dead German is a good German. Neša [surname blurred] Why are Germans coming to Kragujevac again? [signature blurred] Unbelievable and terrifying. All those images … [signature blurred]

One visitor went as far as to call the Museum “21 October” the “Serbian Wailing Wall”: My name is Petar and I have come to the museum with Nevena, as her guest in Kragujevac. I have been looking at the photos and reading the texts for almost an hour now, tears have started to drop, and I am still here, and Nevena and I are alone, and there is no one except the clock of time, and this hurts me as much as what I see here. This is the Serbian Wailing Wall, the saddest place in Serbia, and there is still no one, we are still alone, and the entrance ticket was one hundred dinars, only twenty dinars cheaper than the coffee I had in town this morning. We cannot change what has happened, but we can change our awareness; do not

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allow this place to be empty, those whose names are written on these walls do not deserve that. I will return to this place as soon as I come back, please, I want to meet you here, for us to be silent together. (Kartalovi´c 2016)

The last part of the exhibition space is dedicated to honoring the victims. An art installation has been created (by Igor Stepanˇci´c and Irena Paunovi´c) for this purpose, and it serves a double role: on the one hand, it is a museum exhibit in tune with the other museum objects that surround it; on the other hand, it is a separate room that the visitor can enter to be separated off from the rest of the exhibition (Fig. 6.17). The circles of light that make up this installation—one circle conveys one life that has ended—include a photograph and the name, surname, year of birth, and profession of the victim (for those for whom such data was collected). As the curator Jelena Davidovi´c claims, from a historical point of view, the intention behind adding the profession alongside the name and surname of each victim aims to show how those taken to be executed were chosen according to no particular logic, that is, those

Fig. 6.17 Installation dedicated to the victims (Museum “21 October”), outer view (Photo 2016 © by Nataša Jagdhuhn)

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executed were citizens from various walks of life.64 From a museological perspective, the idea of a separate museum unit dedicated to each individual victim has the goal of “putting a face” on each victim. Consequently, unlike Yugoslav museums in which the victims were presented collectively, i.e., as part of a group—alongside the motto “victims of fascist terror,” or in the case of Kragujevac, “victims of the revolution”—the curators of the new display have been guided by the idea of “individualiz[ing] the victims” (Sodaro 2018, p. 24), which is a general museological trend in post-1989 museology. The premises underpinning “re-humanization” (Young 1993) in victim representation are borrowed from the theory and practice of the Holocaust Museum. A darkened space in which the visitor is confronted with the tragedy in a meditative way, led by a play of light and shadow, is uncannily reminiscent of similar art installations in different museums that deal with the suffering, especially those of Jews in the Second World War. This is not merely a matter of the congruence of visual “codes,” but rather, it could be argued that the installation’s language belongs to the discursive system through which “democratic museology” is legitimized. A certain discomfort in reading the overall museum display emerges through its expositional politics—the choice of certain objects that correspond to certain museum themes. The art installation by Igor Stepanˇci´c and Irena Paunovi´c is surrounded by the monumental reproduction of Lubarda’s painting Enough Blood, Enough Killing and the sculpture by Nador Glid entitled October of Kragujevac (a sculpture from 1975). Nearby there are also two sculptures by Oto Logo—The Breakthrough to the East and Death of the Mastodon (1975). Like Lubarda, Logo was a sculptor celebrated for his memorial art in Yugoslavia (Fig. 6.18). All the listed artworks are paradigmatic examples of the Yugoslav socialist modernist, culturological system of representation. This places two languages of representation inside a single theme, which are both presented to the visitor simultaneously. The works by Lubarda, Glid, and Logo are in the dominant style, which is a socialist aesthetic. This statesupported art movement operated to bring antifascism and the revolution to abstract forms, and is intended to stir a socialist faith and idealism in visitors, practically embodying socialist culture in a Yugoslav vein. However, the ambient multimedia installation, created for the new museum display opened in 2003, has a style characteristic of postmodern practices for creating art installations in Holocaust museums, by calling

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Fig. 6.18 Permanent exhibition of the Museum “21 October” in Kragujevac (Photo 2016 © by “Memory Lab”)

the visitors to position themselves, “body and soul,” within the installation. This style is more about creating a situation, rather than making a physical space that invites interaction and consequently responsibility. It provokes a new way of looking at the “universality” of the tragedy of suffering, to open up the general theme of human rights violations and encourage visitors to question their own conscience in the context of current historical events. Therefore, the historical contingencies of knowledge of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav “memorial art”—the examples offered through the listed art installations—lie on completely opposite conceptual bases. The “screen,” which is always placed between the object and observer, appears here in the form of a pair of glasses with two differently colored ideological lenses. The explicit intention of the new display’s authors was to build a new permanent museum display free of any form of ideology. Yet this attempt to create a seemingly “neutral” museum space may be regarded as a flaw of the exhibition. The result is an exhibition that functions as a collage of cited archival sources and works of art that do not belong to the same social and discursive order. In summary, there is no common

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thread linking the exhibition’s interpretative nodes, that is, supporting how the different parts of the museum interact, linking them together into a coherent story, and creating a message with which the visitor leaves the museum.

Conclusion Given that the Jasenovac Memorial Museum is the only independent Second World War memorial museum in Croatia to be renovated and financed by the state, its social function lies in demonstrating the willingness of postsocialist Croatia to confront the crimes of the Ustashe. However, the divided commemorations held on the Jasenovac Memorial Site as well as the abolition of the memorial houses dedicated to commemorating Ustashe crimes stand in the way of this goal. Consequently, even the very successful new permanent display in the Jasenovac Memorial Museum does not come across as fully convincing in some areas. From its founding, the Museum of Old Herzegovina mirrors the politics of memory promoted by the authorities in Republika Srpska, and their thesis is that the suffering of Serbs in the Second World War forms the pillars of Republika Srpska’s statehood. However, as is also the case with the museum in Kragujevac, the curators are confronted with what I have described as one of the fundamental burdens of the “post-Yugoslav museological turn,” namely—the absence of adequate museum documents in these museums’ primary collections. The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session symbolizes the effort made by the entity of the Federation of BiH to reactivate feelings of Bosnian and Herzegovinian statehood based on the AVNOJ sessions. For this reason, the exhibition language, put together to promote the values of a state that no longer exists, has become a part of the new, reframed museum settings. An analysis of these museums has demonstrated how this method—reexhibiting parts of the display dating from the Yugoslav period—has been applied in the cases of the Museum “21 October,” the Museum of Old Herzegovina, and the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session—all for different curatorial reasons. However, the common denominator is the ethnically motivated appropriation of the values (and heritage) on which the Yugoslav antifascist struggle rests. The new permanent display in the Museum “21 October” symbolizes the “transition of memory” in Serbia after the year 2000, when the

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museum displays were updated with a new installation that presented the Chetnik Movement as a second resistance movement during the Second World War. This museum can be considered the most important Second World War memorial museum in Serbia, given that October 21 was declared a national holiday in 2011, “The day of remembrance of the Serbian victims of the Second World War.” From that year, a a commemoration of this historical event became a national consensus (Nikoli´c 2012, p. 407), the highest-level representatives of the state attended the commemorations at the Memorial Park “21 October.” The fundamental reason for the revitalization of the museum in Kragujevac was, like at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, to revise the official number of deaths and to offer piety to each individual victim. However, the revitalization has also offered a very superficial explanation of the historical context under consideration. Unlike the Jasenovac Memorial Museum where the design has taken precedence over the narrative, the situation in the Museum “21 October” is the reverse: the narrative has “swallowed” the design.

Notes 1. The exhibition The Storeroom Opens first opened in 2016. It aimed to juxtapose two collections: the collection of the Memorial Center “Josip Broz Tito” and the collection of the Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities. 2. For more on the history of the Museum of Vojvodina and the new permanent exhibition of the Museum of Vojvodina (2010), see Martinov (2013). 3. On the history of the Military Museum in Belgrade, from its foundation in 1959 until 2013, see Radovi´c and Lažeti´c (2000). 4. Personal interview with Radivoje Papi´c at the National Museum of Užice on May 19, 2017. 5. For more on the different stages of (re)building the permanent display in Yugoslavia, see the numerous documents located in the Museum Documentation Center in Zagreb (Program rada Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1977, Program rada Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1978., Program manifestacija za 1979., Izveštaj o radu Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1988., Izveštaj o radu Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1990., Program rada Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1991.). For more on the new exhibition (from 2006) at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, see Ratkovˇci´c (2003), Joviˇci´c (2006), Pejakovi´c (2010), Benˇci´c (2018), Kršini´c Lozica (2011), van der Laarse (2013), and Bareši´c (2018).

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6. This citation has been taken from the document Program rada Spomenpodruˇcja Jasenovac za 1997 (Program of the activities of the Jasenovac Memorial Site for 1997), signed by the director of the Jasenovac Memorial Site, Radovan Trivunˇci´c. The document can be found in the archive of the Museum Documentation Center in Zagreb. 7. This citation has been taken from the document Izveštaj o radu Spomenpodruˇcja Jasenovac za razdoblje od 1.1. do 31.12.1977. godine (Report on the activities of the Jasenovac Memorial Site for the period from 1.1. to 31.12.1977.), signed by Jela Kotur. The document can be found in the archive of the Museum Documentation Center in Zagreb. 8. Information taken from a guided tour through the permanent display of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum by the curator Ivo Pejakovi´c and the permanent display coauthor Nataša Matauši´c in 2015 as part of a study visit. The visit was organized by Documenta—Center for Dealing with the Past and Topographie des Terrors, September 30, 2015. 9. Information taken from the website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site: www. jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6715 [Accessed August 25, 2018]. 10. Ibid. 11. In 1968 Dušan Džamonja created a relief titled To the Victims of Fascism in Jasenovac especially for the permanent display of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. 12. Information taken from the website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site: www. jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6560 [Accessed August 31, 2018]. 13. Citation taken from the document Program rada Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1978 (Program of the activities of the Jasenovac Memorial Site for 1978, signed by the director of the Jasenovac Memorial Site, Radovan Trivunˇci´c. The document can be found in the archive of the Museum Documentation Center in Zagreb. 14. Data taken from the document Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac. Program manifestacija Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za 1979. god. (Program of events for 1979 at the Jasenovac Memorial Site), signed by the director of the Jasenovac Memorial Site, Jovan Mirkovi´c. The document can be found in the archive of the Museum Documentation Center in Zagreb. 15. All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated. 16. For more details see the website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site: www. jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6575 [Accessed September 5, 2018]. 17. Ibid. 18. The most explicit example of this is the exhibition The Genocide against the Serbian People in the 20th Century, which opened in 1999 in the Museum “Kozara in the NOB” in Mrakovica. The exhibition Jasenovac – A System of Ustashe Death Camps, which was planned in 1997 in the Belgrade Museum of the Victims of Genocide was of the same type: see Matauši´c (2003, p. 40). The current permanent display of the Museum

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22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

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of Republika Srpska also cultivates the method of a “forensic aesthetic” in a section dedicated to the history of the Jasenovac concentration camp. Ibid. The other coauthor is Rosana Ratkovˇci´c, curator of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. For more on exhibiting the witness as object, i.e., video testimonies as museum objects and as a new trend in memorial museums, see de Jong (2018). The creators of the database are Mihovilovi´c Ðord-e and Smreka Jelka. See Mihovilovi´c and Smreka (2007). Information taken from a guided tour through the permanent display of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum by Nataša Matauši´c in 2015 as part of a study visit, organized by Documenta—Center for Dealing with the Past and Topographie des Terrors, September 30, 2015. Direct citation from the museum panel. “At the Jasenovac concentration camp there were no gas chambers, but this in no way lessened the tragedy of the victims; rather, it made it even greater, as people were killed by having their throats cut; by being hanged, poisoned, burned, or beaten; by starving or due to hard physical labor”— part of the text from the “Death camp” panel. Information taken from a guided tour through the permanent display of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum by curator Ivo Pejakovi´c and the permanent display coauthor Nataša Matauši´c in 2015 as part of a study visit, organized by Documenta—Centre for Dealing with the Past and Topographie des Terrors, September 30, 2015. The fully justified criticisms demonstrate the exhibition’s negligence regarding the role of the crimes’ perpetrators, according to Andriana Benˇci´c, the curator of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. The criticisms have come from all sides and have been constant since the opening of the new exhibition. See Benˇci´c (2018, p. 51). Information taken from a guided tour through the permanent display of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum by curator Ivo Pejakovi´c and the permanent display coauthor Nataša Matauši´c in 2015 as part of a study visit, organized by Documenta—Center for Dealing with the Past and Topographie des Terrors, September 30, 2015. Direct citation from the museum panel. Cited by Nataša Matauši´c during her guided tour through the permanent display of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in 2015 as part of a study visit, organized by Documenta—Center for Dealing with the Past and Topographie des Terrors, September 30, 2015. For more on the Foˇca Republic, see Tucakovi´c (1982). The thematic plan of the exhibition was undersigned by Dušan Kojovi´c, the curator of the Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina

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34.

35.

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at the time. This document is presently kept at the Documentation Center of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Foˇca regulations were the basic instructions for the work of the people’s liberation committees in the liberated territories from February 1942. A new electoral system adopting them was established. In addition to the directives, the system of the delegate method for selecting the higher authority was introduced and women’s right to vote was confirmed. The permanent museum exhibitions Foˇca in the Past and Ethnographic setting will not be analyzed, due to their format and the focus of this text. Also, the exhibition Dr. Risto Jeremi´c, which opened in 2016 as an addition to the exhibition Foˇca in the Past, is out of the scope of this analysis. Personal interview during a guided tour by the curator of the Museum of Old Herzegovina, Danko Mihailovi´c, October 15, 2015. If we compare the synopsis of the exhibition Foˇca in the NOB and the exhibition’s current appearance, we can see that the following slogans have been removed: “Long live the People’s Liberation Front of all the peoples of Yugoslavia!”; “Long live our heroic People’s Liberation Partisan and Volunteer Army of Yugoslavia!”; “Long live the heroic Red Army!”; “Cheers to our great allies: The Soviet Union, England and America!”; “Death to the occupiers and their fifth column servants!” These slogans were part of the thematic section, “The Political Activity of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Central Committee of the League of Communist Youth.” For more, see Kojovi´c (1978, p. 100). The following slogans were removed from the thematic section “The Work of the Central Committee of the KPJ and the Supreme Headquarters of the NOP and DVJ on the Building and Fortification of the Armed Forces”: “Death to fascism – freedom to the people!”; “Long live the People’s Liberation Struggle!”; “Long live the Partisan units – the unflinching fighters for people’s liberty and justice!”; “Down with capitalists and traitors!” For more, see Kojovi´c (1978, p. 67). The thematic plan consisted of the following units: “Arrival of the Central Committee of KPJ and the Supreme Headquarters of NOP and DVJ in Foˇca, January 25, 1942”; “Crimes of the Occupiers, Chetniks and Ustashe in the Region of Eastern Bosnia”; “Work of the Central Committee of KPJ and the Supreme Headquarters of the NOP and DVJ in the Building and Fortification of the Armed Forces”; “Medical Corps on the Territory of Southeast Bosnia During the Stay of the Central Committee of KPJ and the Supreme Headquarters of the NOP and DVJ in Foˇca”; “Political Activity of the Central Committee of KPJ and the Central Committee of SKOJ”; “Foˇca Regulations for the Organization and Tasks of the People’s Liberation Committees”; “People’s Liberation Committees on the Liberated Territory of Southeast Bosnia”; “Publishing Activity

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

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of the Central Committee of the KPJ and the Supreme Headquarters of the NOP and DVJ in Foˇca”; “Occupier quisling operations in Southeast Bosnia”; “Departure of the Central Committee of the KPJ and the Supreme Headquarters of the NOP and DVJ from Foˇca.” For more, see Kojovi´c (1978, pp. 46–132). Direct citation from the museum panel. The phrase “collapse” is used here for the invasion of Yugoslavia; the “April War”—a German attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941—marks the beginning of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Personal interview during a guided tour by the curator of the Museum of Old Herzegovina, Danko Mihailovi´c, October 21, 2015. Ibid. Ibid. Direct citation from the museum panel. Ibid. Personal interview during a guided tour by the curator of the Museum of Old Herzegovina, Danko Mihailovi´c, October 21, 2015. In 1963 the coat of arms was redesigned; it had six torches symbolizing the constituent republics of the Yugoslav federation. In 1971, Muslims were recognized as one of the six constituent peoples in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Photographs of the participants in the Theater of the People’s Liberation can be found on the website of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session: www.muzejavnoj.ba/galerije/kazaliste-narodnog-oslobo denja [Accessed December 22, 2018]. The thematic plan was designed by Živojn Spasi´c (director of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session), Gojko Vujiˇci´c (Yugoslav Army colonel, the Military Museum’s NOB Head of Department) and Ljubinko Marinkovi´c (professor, associate at the Military Museum in Belgrade). See the unpublished booklet The Investment Program of the Museum Display Refurbishment and Adaptation (Investicioni program sanacije i izmene muzejske postavke), which offers a detailed description of the material and form of each object in the hall during the Second AVNOJ Session. It is the most reliable source documenting the inventory and description of the hall in which the Second AVNOJ Session took place and it formed the basis for the 1977 permanent museum display. The booklet can be found in the archive of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session. Milovan Ðilas was previously a member of the Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army and Yugoslav Partisan Units and an AVNOJ councilor. He served a prison sentence from 1955 to 1966 because of his critical articles written in 1953, and he was therefore stripped of his national hero title. This order is referenced in archival documents. See AJ, 297, Savez udruženja boraca NOR-a, Komisija za negovanje

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51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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revolucionarnih tradicija NOR-a, f. 102, Dokumentacija o izgradnji memorijalnog Muzeja Drugog zasjedanja AVNOJ-a, 1956–1971. The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session today safeguards the original copy of the booklet The Investment Program of the Museum Display Refurbishment and Adaptation. In 2012, staff at the AVNOJ Museum came across film strips of several interviews with AVNOJ councilors, which were conducted in the 1960s. The Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session website has made all the thirty-seven interviews available: https://www.muzejavnoj.ba/video-arhiv [Accessed December 23, 2018]. Personal interview with Enes Milak, Jajce, September 21, 2012. The thematic plan of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session’s new permanent display, written by Nataša Matauši´c, can be found in the archives of the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session. The current staff at the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session was not able to provide this information, nor did I find it in the museum archives made available to me for research purposes. Texts that appear on the panels of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian Herzegovinian pavilions can be obtained from the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session website: www.muzejavnoj.ba/virtuelna-tura/sala [Accessed December 23, 2018]. The citation is from the museum panels. At that moment, at the execution site, there were crosses placed by relatives of the victims (evidence of which can be found in photographs exhibited in the museum today). Personal interview during a guided tour by the senior curator of the Museum “21 October,” Jelena Davidovi´c, October 22, 2015. The other two coauthors of the thematic plan for the new permanent display of the Museum “21 October” are the historians Dr. Milan Koljanin (Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade) and Staniša Brki´c (curator of the Museum “21 October”). Paraphrased from a series of phone and email interviews I conducted with the historian Nenad Ðord-evi´c in July 2018. Ibid. Personal interview during a guided tour by the senior curator of the Museum “21 October,” Jelena Davidovi´c, October 22, 2015. Ibid. Ibid.

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Kojovi´c, Dušan. 1978. Muzeološka obrada i prikaz djelatnosti rukovodstva NORa Jugoslavije u Foˇci od 25. januara do 10. maja 1942. Magister thesis, Sveuˇcilište u Zagrebu. Kojovi´c, Dušan. n.d. Tematsko-ekspozicioni plan stalne postavke “Foˇca in NOB.” Arhiv Historijskog Muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine (Archive of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Komisija za negovanje revolucionarnih tradicija NOR-a. n.d. Dokumentacija o izgradnji memorijalnog Muzeja Drugog zasjedanja AVNOJ-a, 1956–1971. Arhiv Jugoslavije (Archive of Yugoslavia), fond 297, folder 102. Koselleck, Reinhard. 2002. Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses. In Verbrechen erinnern: die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, eds. Volkhard Knigge and Norbert Frei, 21–32. Munich: C. H. Beck. Kotur, Jela. 1977. Izveštaj o radu Spomen-podruˇcja Jasenovac za razdoblje od 1.1. do 31.12.1977. godine. Spomen-podruˇcje Jasenovac. Archive of the Museum Documentation Centre, Zagreb. Kršini´c Lozica, and Ana. 2011. Izmed-u memorije i zaborava: Jasenovac kao dvostruko posredovana trauma. Radovi Instituta Za Povijest Umjetnosti 35: 297–308. Kršini´c Lozica, Ana. 2018. Jasenovac na filmu: manipulacije identitetima i izvedba pam´cenja. In Jasenovac-manipulacije, kontroverze i povijesni revizionizam, eds. Andriana Benˇci´c, Stipe Odak and Danijela Luci´c, 143–167. Jasenovac: Javna ustanova Spomen-podruˇcje Jasenovac. Lacan, Jacques. 1978. What Is a picture? In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, 67–78. New York: W. W. Norton. Macdonald, Sharon. 2008. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Maroevi´c, Ivo. 1995. The Museum Message: Between the Document and Information. In Museum, Media, Message, ed. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 24–36. London: Routledge. Martinov, Vojislav. 2013. Tihi jubilej – 40 godina od otvaranja stalne postavke Muzeja socijalistiˇcke revolucije Vojvodine. Muzej Vojvodine 55: 53–72. Novi Sad: Muzej Vojvodine. Martinovi´c, Marija. 2013. Exhibition space of remembrance: Rhythmanalysis of memorial park Kragujevaˇcki oktobar. SAJ—Serbian Architectural Journal 5 (3): 306–329. https://doi.org/10.5937/saj1303306m. Matauši´c, Nataša. 2003. Jasenovac 1941. - 1945.: Logor smrti i radni logor. Jasenovac: Javna ustanova Spomen-podruˇcje Jasenovac. Matauši´c, Nataša. 2011. Jasenovac: The Brief History. Jasenovac: Jasenovac Memorial Site.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Transitional Metamuseology

Abstract This chapter discusses how the post-Yugoslav transition has opened up the possibility of viewing the Second World War memorial museums as historical artifacts. Even three decades after the breakup of Yugoslavia, in most of the Second World War memorial museums in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia the permanent exhibitions conceptualized during Yugoslavia have been retained without any changes or with only minor additions. The key reasons for this unusually slow reform are the following: (1) the ad hoc renovation of the museums destroyed in the wars (1991–1995) by the preconflict curators; (2) the nonexistence of a national framework for memorial policies; (3) the lack of a museological vision in choosing how to communicate the (transnational) heritage of the Second World War. When I asked the curators of the Second World War memorial museums, “How has the image of the Second World War changed since the breakup of Yugoslavia,” most gave the following answer: “We haven’t changed anything of crucial importance.”1 One of the reasons for retaining and copying the Yugoslav exhibitions is that doing so directly counteracts the “compulsory amnesia” (Velikonja 2017, p. 9) enforced by the destruction of museum displays in the wars of the 1990s. A second reason is that the curators were unable to step away from the obsolete matrixes and create a new museal story, given © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8_7

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that their theoretical and practical experience of museological work was drawn from the Yugoslav period. Indeed, these curators had demonstrated a high degree of social engagement by setting up and participating in actions to renovate the Second World War memorial museums (immediately after the wars of the 1990s). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, they then became the authors of the new exhibitions. The third crucial factor is the speed with which these curators responded to rescue the museums. These institutions were managed by the local authorities and quickly fell hostage to (local) politics, and the post-Yugoslav political climate was not at all favorable to Second World War heritage (as the former state-building symbol of Yugoslavia). Thus, the individuals who participated in renovating these museums, be they curators or members of antifascist associations, shared the mission of gaining legal approval and minimal financial resources to return these institutions to their public function. This “freezing” of the Second World War memorial museums in postconflict and postsocialist Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, besides all the above, was caused by the financial situation in which these institutions found themselves amid the new sociopolitical circumstances. The next step was the absence of a framework for national heritage policies in these states. Finally, the most important factor for the stagnation was the inability of museum practitioners and theoreticians to imagine a new transnational museological platform on which to discuss and generate a new discourse about the Second World War. The political tension around the inherited museums’ collections is a sufficiently strong barrier, and it renders curators incapable of constructing new principles for representing the Second World War. This type of tension also contributes to a generation gap present among curators from the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav generations. Here, there is an unbridgeable gap in understanding the role of the museum, which originates from two schools of thought, namely pre1990s and post-1990s modes of exhibition making. The former consists of curators, mostly historians, who created the Yugoslav museums (in direct cooperation with Party delegates). They did so first under the directives of Marxist–Leninist museology, and then later in the spirit of Yugoslav socialist modernism. The latter are a new generation of curators who have been educated in university departments of museology, and with no insight into the theoretical background of the Soviet and “nonaligned” museologies.

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Three decades of the above factors operating to transform the post-Yugoslav Second World War museums has turned these memorial institutions into centers of tension, not only between curators and heritage users (the loosely defined public) but also a clearly detectable tension between the form and content of the exhibitions, and between the historical narrative and its communicative form. These tensions form the basic characteristic of the postsocialist transitional period, not only in the former Yugoslav region but also in the broader Eastern European context. As a mirror for society, museums offer the opportunity to perceive the reciprocal interpenetration and mixing of influences, of two systems for the production and protection of cultural goods: the inherited and the invented. In conclusion, a political climate in which a “negative memory” (Koselleck 2002; Knigge & Frei 2002) is undesirable, and the status of the memorial Second World War museums is uncertain, threatens the integrity of the curatorial profession. The Yugoslav successor states’ unwillingness to confront the consequences of the 1990s warmongering instrumentalization of the Second World War narrative is possibly why no end to the postsocialist museum transition is yet in sight. Under these circumstances, “performing museology” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2000) becomes a compromise that attempts to solve the problem of how to revitalize the former museums of the People’s Liberation Struggle. This type of museology advocates self-reflection as a museal method, that is, as curatorial strategies through which the historical role of the museum as well as its current position in society should be carefully considered. Drawing on a self-reflexive museological concept, in many cases the slow reform of the museums of the People’s Liberation Struggle entailed minimal or no interventions in inherited exhibitions. Thus, through emerging in the new context intact, many exhibitions on the Second World War became in-between spaces where each new state’s relation to the fall of Yugoslav socialism could be studied. This is because these museums no longer represent the history of the Second World War but rather offer themselves as places where the relation(s) to Yugoslav memory politics can be explored. However, this is not the case with the entire post-Yugoslav museumscape. A review of the overall transformation of Second World War memorial museums in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia shows that in some cases the entire exhibitions (or a large part of them) designed in the Yugoslav period have been preserved in their original form, but

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that new museum sections have also been added to them. The motives for such curatorial interventions have been guided by the principles of Eastern European “transitional museology.” In parallel with the concept of “transitional justice,” transitional museology is “a specific type of museology born in times of transition from conflict and/or state repression in order to honor the victims and come to terms with a specific traumatic history” (B˘adescu et al. 2018, p. 10). The concept that would most precisely illustrate the post-Yugoslav museal turn is transitional metamuseology—as a combination of “performative museology” and “transitional museology.” Its focus lies in the experience of the museum rather than the museum object, which is why parts of the exhibition taken from the Yugoslav period still spatially dominate the museum sections that have been created over the past two decades. Nevertheless, the ethnocentric cultural matrix, which is omnipresent in the public space of the successor states of Yugoslavia, is a key and unavoidable factor that influences what visitors actually see when setting foot in these “museums of museums” (Buden 2016). By offering an “unstable picture of the past” (Kulji´c 2006), post-Yugoslav transitional metamuseums reexamine the mechanisms of museum knowledge production and, accordingly, encourage the establishment of a new value relationship with the past. It can certainly be claimed that, regardless of the prevalence of Yugoslav metamuseological discourses in current Second World War exhibitions, it is not the revival of Yugoslav sentiment that is at work here, but the completely opposite principle: the de-Yugoslavization of the museum field through metamuseological curatorial strategies. This book aims to encourage future research on correlations and antagonisms between memory politics in postconflict Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina over the first three decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, it is the only monograph on the musealization of the Second World War in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space (1945–2022). As such it offers a basis for studying the war biographies of the Second World War memorial museums and houses and, even more importantly, for researching the historicopolitical complexity of the postYugoslav museal turn. This will greatly help future researchers dealing with the revitalization of Second World War memorial museums in postYugoslav societies, and it will orient them in their quest to understand the complexities underpinning the liberation of these institutions from the shadows of an undesirable heritage cast upon them in the 1990s.

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Note 1. The book includes citations from thirty-one interviews that I conducted with current (and sometimes even former) curators or directors of Second World War memorial museums in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia.

References B˘adescu, Gruia, Simina B˘adic˘a, and Damiana Ot, oiu. 2018. Curating Change in the Museum: Introduction to the Volume. Martor 23: 9–13. Buden, Boris. 2016. In the Museum of Museums. In Performing the Museum: The Reader, ed. Aleksandra Sekuli´c and Dušan Grlja, 17–22. Novi Sad: Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2000. The Museum as Catalyst. Keynote Address, “Museums: Confirmation or Challenge” Conference, Hosted by ICOM Sweden, the Swedish Museum Association and Swedish Travelling Exhibitions/Riksutställningar, Vadstena, 29 September. https://www.nyu. edu/classes/bkg/web/vadstena.pdf. Accessed 28 September 2021. Knigge, Volkhard, and Norbert Frei. 2002. Einleitung. In Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, ed. Volkhard Knigge and Norbert Frei, vii–xii. Munich: C. H. Beck. Koselleck, Reinhard. 2002. Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses. In Verbrechen erinnern: die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, ed. Volkhard Knigge, Norbert Frei, and Anett Schweitzer, 21–32. Munich: C. H. Beck. Kulji´c, Todor. 2006. Kritiˇcka kultura se´canja. Pešˇcanik. https://pescanik.net/kri ticka-kultura-secanja. Accessed 21 April 2022. Stojanovi´c, Dubravka. 2010. Ulje na vodi: Ogledi iz istorije sadašnjosti Srbije. Belgrade: Pešˇcanik. Velikonja, Mitja. 2017. When Times Were Worse, the People Were Better: The Ideological Potentials and Political Scope of Yugonostalgia. In Nostalgia on the Move, ed. Mirjana Slavkovi´c and Marija Ðorgovi´c, 7–13. Belgrade: Muzej Jugoslavije.

Index

A Aesthetic “forensic aesthetics”, 160, 184 socialist aestheticism, 48, 185 socialist realism, 48 Alliance of Antifascist Fighters of the Republic of Croatia (Savez antifašistiˇckih boraca i antifašista Republike Hrvatske, SABH), 109 Alliance of Anti-Fascists and Fighters of the People’s Liberation War in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Savez antifašista i boraca narodnoosolobodilaˇckog rata u Bosni i Hercegovini, SABNOR BiH), 112, 113 Alliance of Fighters of the People’s Liberation Wars of Serbia (Savez udruženja narodnooslobodilaˇckih ratova Srbije, SUBNOR of Serbia), 97, 117, 118 Andrejevi´c Kun, Ðord-e (painter), 205 Antagonistic narratives, 53

Anti-Fascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašistiˇcko Vije´ce Narodnog Oslobodjenja Jugoslavije, AVNOJ), 5, 24, 202, 205 April War, 191, 223, 226 Art Gallery of the Non-aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito”, 106 Associations of Veterans of the People’s Liberation War of Yugoslavia (SUBNOR), 16 Committee for the Maintenance and Making of Historical Sites from the People’s Liberation War (Odbor za obeležavanje i ured-ivanje istorijskih mesta Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata), 17, 50 Augustinˇci´c, Antun (sculptor), 203, 205, 208, 212 Axis powers, 82

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Jagdhuhn, Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10228-8

251

252

INDEX

B Badinter’s 1991 Arbitration Commission, 212, 215 Banjica, 30 concentration camp, 31, 33, 176 Museum “Banjica Concentration Camp”, 29, 31, 119, 150, 161 Batina, 96, 107, 111, 158 Battle, 27, 95 Ljuboja, Milka (curator), 127 Museum “Battle on Batina”, 27, 95, 96, 102, 118, 119, 165 Belgrade City Museum, 31, 119, 120 Military Museum, 18, 49, 157, 176, 194, 218 Museum “4 July”, 24, 31, 120 Museum of genocide victims, 91 Museum of Illegal Printing Houses, 24 Biha´c Creative Republic, 148 Maslak, Nijazija (museum director), 115 Midži´c, Davor (curator), 115 Museum of the First AVNOJ Session, 24, 54, 115 Museum of Una-Sana Canton, 115 Bleiburg, 82–85, 87, 121 Bogdanovi´c, Bogdan (architect), 184, 185 Stone Flower (monument), 179–181, 185 Bosanska Krajina, 26 Bosnia and Herzegovina Commission for the Maintenance of the National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Komisija za oˇcuvanje nacionalnih spomenika Bosne i Hercegovine), 116

Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), 154 Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije, SDA), 86 Republika Srpska entity Army of the Republika Srpska, 91, 117, 160 Dodik, Milorad (politician), 91, 94 Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka), 86 Sarajevo Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 33 Vrace Memorial Park, 117 Bosniak, 5, 86–90, 99, 123, 154, 155, 160, 196 Bosnian, 89, 90, 99, 113, 116, 159, 160, 178, 194, 196, 204, 208, 209, 231 C ˇ cak Caˇ Museum of Revolutionary Youth, 120 Chetnik Mihailovi´c, Draža (Chetnik leader), 92, 119, 198 Movement, 3, 4, 19, 92, 118, 151, 153, 200, 217, 224–226, 232 Ravna Gora, 119 “second resistance movement”, 151, 232 Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland (Jugoslovenska vojska u otadžbini, JVuO), 3, 19, 33, 121, 150, 176

INDEX

ˇ Colakovi´ c, Radoljub (politician), 61 Cold War, 13, 19, 68 Collaborationists “collaborators of the fascist occupiers”, 3 “domestic enemy”, 19 “domestic traitors”, 3, 32 “fascist servants”, 3 “fascist terror”, 3 “second resistance movement”, 151 Council for Dealing with Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes (Vije´ce za suoˇcavanje s posljedicama vladavine nedemokratskih režima), 85, 193 Croatia/Croats Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ), 82 Mesi´c, Stjepan (politician), 188 Tudjman, Franjo (president), 82, 83, 121, 188 Uprising of the People of Croatia – 27 July 1941, 26 ˇ Curug ˇ Museum “Victims of the Curug Raid”, 119 Cyrillic (alphabet), 89, 122, 196 D Dayton Peace Agreement, 86, 88 Drvar Museum “25th May 1944”, 114 Trnini´c, Drago (curator), 114, 150 Džamonja, Dušan (sculptor), 181, 182, 185, 233 E Ethnicity, 4, 176, 186 ethnonationalization, 105, 161

253

Europe/European Eastern, 32, 34, 62, 66, 145, 146, 247, 248 South, 146 Western, 62 European Union, 193, 194, 214 F Fascism, 1, 2, 4, 12, 13, 23, 33, 82–84, 156, 182, 185, 193, 215, 218 anti-fascism, 14, 80, 97, 149, 152, 229 Federation of Veterans’ Associations from the People’s Liberation War (Savez udruženja boraca Narodnooslobodilaˇckog rata, hereinafter SUBNOR), 16, 47, 80 Foˇca Foˇca Regulations (Foˇcanski propisi), 25, 195, 199, 203 Memorial room of fallen soldiers and civilian victims of the Defensive Patriotic War, 155, 198 Mihailovi´c, Danke (curator), 92, 119, 198 Museum “The Foˇca period of the People’s Liberation Struggle”, 25, 115, 162, 194, 195, 199 Museum of Old Herzegovina, 147, 158, 194, 197 Pijade, Moša (creator of the so-called “Foˇca regulations”), 25, 196, 203, 206 G Genocide cultural, 104 “heritocide”, 104

254

INDEX

“literocide”, 105 “memoricide”, 105 “mnemocide”, 105 “urbicide”, 105 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 146 Glid, Nador (sculptor), 229 Glina Croatian Hall (Hrvatski dom), 111 Memorial House of the Victims of Ustashe Terror, 31, 111

H Hague convention, 105 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 99 Hegeduši´c, Krsto (painter), 98 Heritage “difficult heritage”, 3, 190 dissonant heritage, 81 memorial site, 23, 90, 117, 181, 193 rebranding, 149 renaming, 5, 122 War heritage, 52, 81, 107, 110, 123, 168, 169, 246 Holocaust, 3, 12, 13, 30, 31, 33, 111, 179, 192, 193, 229 Homeland museum (zaviˇcajni muzej ), 45

I Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), 3, 82, 84–86, 121, 122, 155, 179, 191, 201, 203 Informbiro, 2 International Committee for Museology of the International

Council of Museums (ICOFOM), 64 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 16

J Jablanica ´ Camil, Cero (museum director), 99, 114, 155 Museum “Battle for the Wounded on the Neretva River”, 89, 99, 114, 115, 153–155, 164, 166, 194 Jajce Leko, Emsada (museum director), 210 Milak, Enes (museum director), 210, 212 Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session, 24, 113, 211 Jasenica Musuem “Podgrmeˇc – NOB in Jasenica”, 27, 116 Jasenovac concentration camp, 29, 30, 33, 82, 85, 93, 179, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187–189, 192, 193 Donja Gradina (memorial zone), 94, 189 Joviˇci´c, Nataša (museum director), 185, 193 Memorial Museum/Site, 29, 31, 48, 55, 83, 93, 94, 96, 102, 111, 112, 122, 153, 162, 178–185, 188, 190, 193, 194, 231, 232 Stara Gradiška (memorial zone), 94, 192 Jews Jewish Historical Museum Belgrade, 33

INDEX

monuments to the victims of fascist terror, 12, 31, 49, 176, 229

K Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, 94 Kosovo, 89, 157, 216 Kragujevac Museum “21 October”, 30, 118, 152, 182, 230 Jelena Davidovi´c (curator), 221, 223, 228 October in Kragujevac Memorial Park, 30, 181, 218 The Old Foundery Museum in Kragujevac, 157 Krupanj Museum “7 July Museum”, 26 Kumrovec Birth House of Josip Broz Tito, 85

L Lipa Govi´c, Vana (curator), 165 Maljavac, Danica (former curator), 165, 166 Memorial Centre “Lipa remembers”, 110, 153, 161, 165, 167 Museum “Lipa remembers” (in Yugoslavia), 29, 48, 54–56, 166, 167 Logo, Oto (sculptor), 229 Lubarda, Petar (painter), 220, 229

M Massacre, 29, 82, 202, 217, 220, 227 Matauši´c, Nataša (curator), 111, 113, 126, 127, 186, 189, 191, 211, 212, 233, 234, 237

255

Memorial House Memorial House at Petrova Gora, 97 Memorial House “Battle on Sutjeska”, 22, 27, 48, 56, 57, 97, 98, 116, 162 Memorial House “Boško Buha”, 120, 162 Memorial House in Brestik, 36, 129 Memorial House in Glina, 31, 111 Memorial House in Komogovina, 129 Memorial House in Ljeskovac, 36, 129 Memorial House in Svinica, 129 Memorial House in Trnovac, 37 ˇ Memorial House “Janko Cmelnik”, 162, 171 Memorial House “NOB in Punat”, 22, 110, 161 Memorial House on Batina, 96, 97, 111, 161, 162 Memorial House on island Iž, 37, 112, 162, 171 Memorial House on Plitvice, 36 Memorial House on Šamarica, 97 Memorial House on Vis, 111 Memory, memorialization, 3, 12, 19, 23, 31, 33, 45, 51, 52, 56, 60, 64, 80, 81, 85–87, 89–91, 93, 94, 96, 106, 110, 121–124, 148, 160, 161, 164, 178, 179, 185, 188, 217, 231 cultural, 81, 83, 85 narratives, 80, 123, 124, 193 Modernism “nonaligned modernism”, 23 “socialist modernism”, 68 Mrkonji´c Grad Museum of the First ZAVNOBiH Session, 25, 116, 194, 216, 217

256

INDEX

Museality, 52, 61, 65, 66, 80 broken, 6 Musealization of reconciliation, 179, 185 of revolution, 24, 33 of struggle, 26, 30 of suffering, 29, 30 of the People’ Liberation Struggle, 44 Museography, 62 Museology “authoritative museum”, 49 Marxist–Leninist museology, 23, 32, 63, 146, 199, 246 metamuseums, 147, 248 “performing museology”, 247 “transitional museology”, 248 Museum of the Revolution, 20, 45, 55, 100, 101, 111, 113, 114, 122, 153, 194

N Nationalism, 12, 67, 120, 147 Nazism, 1, 2, 182 Niš Museum “12 February”, 29, 118 “Red cross” concentration camp, 29, 31, 150 Non-Aligned Movement, 106 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) aggression, 117 bombing, 102, 119, 155–157 Nostalgia, 169

O Orthodox church, 90

P Partisan Movement

ceremonies, 23 commemorations, 85 heritage, 81 monuments, 49, 158 Patriotism, 14, 31, 44, 61, 89, 154, 225 Paveli´c, Ante (Ustasha leader), 190–192 People (Nation) Narodna revolucija (People’s Revolution), 12, 17, 32, 33, 46, 117, 168, 227 Narodnooslobodilaˇcka borba (People’s Liberation Struggle), 1, 5, 12, 13, 44, 46, 51, 61, 67, 68, 81, 117, 123, 196, 198, 200, 216, 226, 247 “people’s culture”, 18, 104 “people’s government”, 12, 216 “people’s movement”, 2 “people’s museum”, 14 People’s Liberation Struggle Museums (Muzeji Narodnooslobodilaˇcke borbe, NOB Museums) “museums of recent history”, 44 NOB monuments, 17, 49, 96, 121 “NOB period”, 22, 53 “NOB sites”, 18, 22 “NOB tradition”, 17, 47 Prijedor Memorial Park Kozara, 90, 124 Milenko Radi´c, curator, 149 Museum “Kozara in NOB”, 26, 149 OK Fest (music festival rock festival), 149 Prijepolje Museum of the Pioneer and Youth Movements of Yugoslavia, 119, 164 National Museum in Prijepolje, 120

INDEX

Pušica, Slavoljub (museum director), 120 Prnjavor Park of National Heroes in Prnjavor, 158 R Reprisals, 4, 33, 87, 176, 217, 222, 223 Republic of Srpska Krajina, 92, 93, 202 Revision, 5, 69, 86, 91, 168, 199, 225 Revisionism, 4, 5, 82, 86, 121, 164, 169 Rival narratives, 5 Rudo Museum “The First Proletarian Brigade”, 27, 89, 116, 161 S School textbooks, 4, 5, 84, 161 Serbia, Srbs Brnabi´c, Ana (politician), 91 Day of the Serbian Uprising (July 7, 1941), 26 History Museum of Serbia, 125 Miloševi´c, Slobodan (president), 89, 92, 102, 118, 121, 128, 156, 157, 160 Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistiˇcka partija Srbije, hereinafter SPS), 89, 156 Vuˇci´c, Aleksandar (politician), 126 Šibenik Memorial Room “Museum of Victory”, 110 Srb Museum “Uprising of the People of Croatia – 27 July 1941”, 26 Srem Front

257

Museum, 28, 59, 102, 118, 161, 163 “White room” installation, 48 Statehood, 99, 123, 178, 213–215, 231 Stolice Museum “Military Counsel in Stolice”, 25, 54, 118, 119, 161 Museum of Republics and Provinces, 215 Šumarice, 176, 217 Sutjeska Battle, 85, 98, 112, 209 Memorial House, 22, 48, 56, 57, 97, 98, 116, 162 National Park, 149 Vukovi´c, Ðord-e (curator), 98 Symbolism, 121, 186, 218 coat of arms, 205

T Tesla, Nikola (inventor), 220 thematic plan outlining the designs (tematsko-ekspozicioni plan), 206 Tito, Josip Broz (president), 49, 58, 68, 81, 85, 107, 111, 128, 131, 153, 155, 180, 194, 195, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 212, 217, 224 Transition, 116, 146, 168, 247, 248 post-Yugoslav, 248

U UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), 105, 109, 113 Ustasha, 83 Užice Museum of the 1941 Uprising, 151

258

INDEX

Museum “The Worker’s Battalion and the Battle on Kadinjaˇca”, 27 National Museum, 118, 157, 170, 232 Republic, 26, 27, 151, 152, 156, 177

V Virtual museum of Dotršˇcina, 111 Vis Museum of the Central Offices of the People’s Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia, 25 Vojvodina, 90, 216 Museum of Vojvodina, 46, 91, 176

W Wars Aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, 86, 123 civil, 2, 5, 32, 122, 151, 185, 225 crimes, 2, 192, 204 Defensive-Fatherland War (Odbrambeno-otadžbinski rat), 86, 154, 155, 159 Homeland War (Domovinski rat), 85, 86 Second World War, 2–6, 13, 17–20, 23, 31–36, 38, 44, 45, 48, 52, 67, 68, 80–82, 84–91, 93–97, 100, 102–104, 107–112, 115–124, 128–130, 132, 145, 147, 149–155, 157–159, 161, 162, 164, 168–171, 176–179, 185, 192–195, 197–199, 202–204, 206, 214–217, 225, 226, 229, 231, 232, 236, 246–249

Y Yugoslavia break-up/dissolution, 6, 16, 132, 179, 194, 248 “brotherhood and unity”, 2, 33, 44, 67, 97, 120, 124, 179 Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Centralni Komitet Komunistiˇcke Partije Jugoslavije, CKKPJ), 17, 24, 25, 194, 195, 217 Fighters’ Day (July 4), 24 League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia (Savez, komunistiˇcke omladine Jugoslavije, SKOJ), 18, 67, 80 Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities, 44, 45 Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, 17, 19, 24, 28 People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, 17, 19, 26, 27, 33, 96, 194 Pioneers, 12, 120 Republic Day, November 29, 12 self-management, 14, 50 socialism, 52, 66, 179, 247 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 23, 106, 154, 168 Socialist Yugoslavia, 1–3, 13, 14, 22, 24, 52, 92, 164 succession, 105 supranational, 2, 12, 31, 81, 179, 221 Supreme Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Partisan Detachments, 17, 25, 224 Yugoslav–Soviet split, 23 Yugoslav Agreement on Succession Issues, 105, 123

INDEX

Yugoslav Communist Party, 3, 53, 198 Yugoslavism, 2, 13, 14, 50, 81, 217 Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija), 93, 101 Z Za dom spremni” (Ustashe slogan “For the Home(land) – ready!”)@“Za dom spremni” (Ustashe slogan “For the Home(land) – ready!”), 84

259

Zagreb Croatian Historical Museum, 188 Museum Documentation Center, 51, 64, 68, 111 ZAVNOBiH (The State Anti-Fascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina/Zemaljsko Antifašistiˇcko Vije´ce Narodnog Oslobod-enja Bosne i Hercegovine), 25, 99, 123, 178, 215