Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context*

Contributed by Gal Kirn
— ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

* This article is a revised and extended version of the article Remembering or Thinking the Partisan Movement, published in the exhibition catalogue The Museum on the Street (2009).

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language, chance and foolishness.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

After the so-called democratic revolutions at the end of the 1980s in the East, the post-socialist era had begun. Due to the transition period and absence of a better concept, ‘postsocialism’ has become a dominant signifier, which aims to cover all historical processes that were at work in these societies. However, the post-socialist condition firmly developed and promoted the advance of neoliberal ideology: the praise of the sacred mechanisms of the free market, the withering away of the welfare state and the embracing of a Europe that will take care of everything1 – everything, it might be said, except the wars in its own backyard. The transitional neoliberal ideology, which targeted the socialist state’s economic management and relations, went hand in hand with its rightwing counterpart. The dissident plea for human rights, launched in the name of parliamentarism and the ‘democratic’ public sphere, was invoked against the gloomy totalitarian past. And the critique of the totalitarian past became a sine qua non of every democratic enunciation.2 If one wanted to belong to a democratic camp, one had to purify oneself from the communist past. No matter how undemocratic some of the new political practices were (the destruction of the welfare state, nationalist outbursts, exclusion of minorities, etc.), and no matter what the dissidents were actually doing,3 the most crucial criterion was their ideological presupposition: anticommunism at any price. However, this ideological conjuncture was neither only imposed from outside, nor was it a mere copy of the neoliberal struggle taking place in the West. Rather, it was formed and framed in the context of local ideologies, which produced something new and tested different more or less unsuccessful models. Post-socialist ideologies became constitutive of the mainstream democratic forces which prepared the terrain for the ‘democratic’ transition. The democratic camp had one common enemy: the ‘communist beast’ from the East. The latter helped to unite all the ‘democratic’ forces in their anticommunist march towards the bright West European future.4

Polemically put, we owe to the dissidents not only the promotion of European integration, but also a process of revision of history, which shall be the main topic of this paper. The post-Yugoslav nation-building processes demanded a new interpretation of history; a whole nationalist ideological project was launched in the wake of the “end of history” (Fukuyama). The ‘thousand-year-old dream’ of ‘one nation in one state’ eventually came true and new national myths had to be invented or transferred from the ancient context. Not only liberalism, but also nationalism provided the major constitutive social ties promoted by the political classes and later embraced by the masses.5 Once installed in power, the (former) dissidents started to ask for moral and legal consequences for the crimes committed by the totalitarian regimes.6 We argue that the postsocialist condition cannot be explained without taking into account the hegemonic ideological doublet of nationalism-liberalism, a sort of neo-liberal conservativism which dominated the ‘new Europe.’ Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when socialism has come to an end (Buden 2009), the post-socialist effects are visible in the old Europe itself. Thus, it is not true that only the ‘West’ affected the ‘East,’ that is, that ex-socialist states had to adopt the western recipes for successful transition; rather, the ‘East’ showed to no lesser degree inventive in reframing the historical discussions7 and in developing its own policies of exclusion. The ultimate post-socialist effect was recently inaugurated by the European Parliament in the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism. The Resolution was adopted in 2009 and the European Parliament proclaimed the August 23 as the commemoration day for totalitarian crimes. This event is an important landmark for the process of the new European memorialization. It is a clear example of historical revisionism: In one swoop it equates communism with fascism, therefore ignoring that the WWII was won by a large alliance of antifascist groups within which communist and partisan forces were its equal and essential part.

This essay focuses on the characteristic features of post-socialist ideology in the post-Yugoslav context, where one of the most important signifiers of nationalist ideologies has become ‘national reconciliation.’ This process, as will be delineated, has worked effectively in legitimizing the ethnic divisions in ex-Yugoslavia, its imagined past and future. The most exemplary case, which we will examine closely, is the management of monuments, which is fashionably labeled the ‘politics of memory.’ The contemporary politics of memory results in the relativization of historical facts, the universalization of the figure of the victim, the reconciliation of partisans and local fascists, or, in very concrete terms, paying pensions to collaborators.8 Post-socialist revisionism, framed as the critique of totalitarianism on the one hand and national reconciliation on the other, is thus the main ideological trajectory and vehicle, which in the last instance rehabilitates fascism, glorifies parliamentary democracy and further disqualifies any emancipatory politics. We shall examine this question in three parts. In the beginning, we shall examine the indicated transformations in the landscape of monuments in the Croatian context using Žižić’s film Damnatio Memoriae (2001). After analyzing the destruction of monuments in the postYugoslavian context, we juxtapose it with the Yugoslav socialist state art and the post-revolutionary politics of aesthetics. In the second part we will reflect on the reconciliation discourse in Slovenia, which reveals typical revisionist aesthetization and memorialization strategies. The new politics of memory will be interpreted as indispensable for the nation-building processes in the post-Yugoslav context.

We shall try to answer the following question: What is the difference between the Yugoslav politics of memory on the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle (1941–1945) and the post-Yugoslav politics of memory? The concluding part exposes a discussion on the Partisan movement, which embarks on a critique of the national reconciliation ideology and renders an alternative interpretation of the war period that in some respect runs counter to the dominant nationalist readings of this period.

1. Post-Yugoslav vs. Yugoslav Socialist Politics of Memory

a) Damnatio Memoriae:9 A Defence of the Aesthetic Effect

Bogdan Žižić made a documentary on the fate of antifascist monuments, which was screened on Croatian public television in 2001. Apart from some minor comments, it had not met the goal to spur national debate on this crucial issue. The film’s voiceover starts with the proposition that a monument is a “sign of the past and a witness to the future.” Monuments, it was alluded, must be encountered respectfully. In contrast to this, Damnatio Memoriae displayed the dynamics and the scope of nationalist policy of retaliations for the antifascist past. It delves into the recent beginnings of Croatian statehood. The Croatian war of independence (1991–1995) fostered extremist nationalism and re-Catholicisation, which materialized most genuinely in ‘grassroots’ politics, which destroyed or mutilated monuments. These actions had at least one common denominator: their goal was to eliminate any historical traces of the existence of Yugoslavia and the antifascist struggle in Croatia. The flipside of this destructive impetus was the creation of a ‘new history.’

For the early 1990s, we can distinguish between two prevalent methods in dealing with monuments. The first strategy pursued conversion of old monuments: they were simply attached with new meanings. In form and shape, the monument would remain the same, except for the red stars being replaced with Catholic crosses, and the antifascist slogans of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle with the Croatian checkerboard coat-ofarms and inscriptions dedicated to the Croatian nation. New memorials were often inaugurated during visits of president Tudjman.10 The other method of getting even with the past, however, was rendered with outright destruction committed systematically by ‘grassroots’ movements. Unknown perpetrators would simply blow up monuments or deface them with tagging Ustasha slogans upon them.

Some of the monuments were partially damaged, as in Dubrovnik (see Figure 1), but remained present as a trace of the unfinished politics of destruction. This inscription is a real document of time, a sign of the past and present. Other statues or sculptures were destroyed and then transferred to forests or fields, or left at the side of the former memorial site (as Figure 2 captures).

Virtually no antifascist monument anywhere in Croatia was spared, apart from several exemplars located in Istria. Yet, one would be in the wrong to assume these actions being directed ‘from above’ and, thus, representing the upshot of some political scheme or hidden agenda of the political class. The documentary evokes to conclude that the destructions and purges were systematic and indicative of some kind of ‘cleansing regime.’ In other words, this cleansing regime tried to eradicate any alien, un-Croatian element, which hinted at the constitution of the socialist Yugoslavia and the Partisan movement. The struggle for a new Croatian identity and the constitution of an independent Croatian nation state thus carried along a specific form of ideological interpellation.

Damnatio Memoriae (2001), documentary ijilm by Bogdan Žižić.
Figure 1: Damnatio Memoriae (2001), documentary film by Bogdan Žižić.
Damnatio Memoriae (2001), documentary ijilm by Bogdan Žižić.
Figure 2: Damnatio Memoriae (2001), documentary film by Bogdan Žižić

Accordingly, every member of the new state would be bound by a double covenant: to the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand and to the Croatian nation on the other. This double-rootedness of ‘Croatian-ness’ was also mirrored in the changed image of the landscape itself, namely in the altered names of monuments and streets that, hence, point to the impact of the conflict on the imaginary realm. How the state authorities were concerned by these events becomes clear through the connected judicial proceedings that could be witnessed. To exemplify, we can again refer to Žižić’s documentary that exposes the case of an artist who had erected an antifascist monument and was filing suit against the desecraters of his work. Symptomatically, the court ruled in favor of the perpetrators and the case was dismissed. In conclusion, the indicated politics of destruction must be judged by the realization of an extreme nationalist project likewise undertaken from above and below. The spontaneity of grassroots activities was at times hidden, at other times openly supported by the authorities.

As important as Žižić’s film is in terms of its informative and historical content and its opening up of a theme, which is of vital importance in the post-Yugoslav context, the political message it conveys, however, seems quite opportunistic. The director is obviously trying to adopt a quasineutral perspective or following the directive to render art for the art’s sake. We have made out two propositions: The first and general thesis supports the point that destruction is a morally intolerable act. Monuments must be respected, since they bear witness to the future.11 The second and more problematic argument can be summed up as follows: while it was true that many of the antifascist monuments were ideological (communist) and, too, poor in artistic regard, still a few of them became internationally acclaimed for their unique aesthetic style. By espousing aesthetic criteria, Žižić reckoned to have avoided any ideological bias and accounted for the autonomous character of art vis-à-vis the political sphere. Although he makes a general plea for the protection of all monuments, it is obvious that he deems some of them superior. The second thesis is, obviously, at odds with the first. What becomes clear from his argumentation is that he beholds ‘ideological’ monuments for unworthy of protection. Žižić, however, takes no pains reflecting systematically the connections between ideology, politics, and art, but simply ignores them.

The fact that some of the monuments are ‘real’ works of art, to my view, does not render them any more worthy of protection. Merely exposing the vandalism and the barbarism of the desecrators suggests that the spectator passes a moral judgment without providing actual explanations and analytically derived reasons. By dispensing with political ideology, Žižić’s argumentation leaves the way open for another kind of ideology, which I would denote ‘aesthetic ideology.’ Žižić intervenes in ‘reality’ through the aesthetic discourse, which allows him to keep his hands devoid of ideology, either communist or fascist. Yet, the underlying assumption that ideology-free thinking and memory were only provided through art must be considered an ideological postulation par excellence. This presupposition betrays a naïve idea about authenticity and purity of the artistic position: as floating in the air, parted from any connections with social reality. In consequence, the point of the documentary hovers in mid-air. It fails to link the neo-fascist politics of monument destruction with its critical role in the process of the constitution of Croatian ethnic community. Instead, Žižić struggled to remain within the realm of aesthetic discourse so that his argumentative strategy could be summed up with the following self-referential formula: What I do is art (a documentary film), in which I defend art (non-ideological monuments = works of art) through art (aesthetic discourse).

b) (Non-)Autonomy of Art: the Case of Antifascist Monuments in Yugoslavia

Even though the question of the social autonomy of art should certainly not be left aside, we should begin our discussion on aesthetics in a more nuanced way than suggested by Žižić. How to reflect the relationship between ideology, politics, and art after the WWII? Was there any aesthetic novelty or artistic autonomy present in the construction of memorial sites? At first glance, the answer would be no. There was a strong connection between the construction of monuments and different dominant political groups. The historical period between 1947 and 1965 saw the mass production of antifascist monuments and memorial sites. The Association of Veterans of the Peoples’ Liberation War (SUBNOR), with the help of federal authorities, launched a project of memorialization and glorification of the Peoples’ Liberation War. The project could be arguably defined as a paradigmatic socialist state art, which consisted of the construction of minor symbolic plates, statues of different size, huge sculptures, murals, paintings, graveyards and memorial parks. Formally, they did not differ much from the canons of war memorials in other countries. They referred to three fundamental narratives of liberation: (1) victory over fascism connected to revolution, (2) victims (suffering of civilians or fighters during fascist occupation), (3) historical context (location of particular antifascist acts, foundation of political and cultural organizations, etc.). Each of them contributed to the common function of memorials: commemoration of the past.

Nevertheless, liberal criticism of totalitarianism would claim that this type of memorialization was merely an ideological project that had nothing to do with art whatsoever. In this view, art was reduced to a mere ideological function, i.e. to represent the partisan struggle and to lay the basis for Yugoslav ideology (the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle as its founding myth). As some authors maintained, this ‘official memory’ – allegedly being constructed with repressive ideological means – was easily dissolved once challenged by the intellectual opposition groups in the 1980s (Denich 1994, Hayden 1994, Höpken 1998). Undoubtedly, the ideological function of these memorial sites is unambiguous: antifascist monuments played a direct and important role in instituting rituals.12 All school children had to visit particular antifascist sites and were taught about the historical background of antifascism and the WWII. Too, it was made sure that everybody learned about the heroism and emancipatory past of Yugoslavia. In contrast to the view of Yugoslavia as a repressed society and its collective memory constituting but a simple reflection of the Party directives, which was imposed on ordinary people, Max Bergholz (2007) evidently demonstrated that ordinary people contested these memorial sites. As he pointed out, they reacted in many different ways: indifference (tying horses to them or letting grass cover them), subversion (telling jokes about them) and direct confrontation (smashing them, preventing people from visiting them). One can see that already at that early historical point memorial sites were sites of ideological struggle, which affected the perception of the Yugoslav revolutionary event. One central component of the recollection of the Yugoslav revolution entailed affirmation of the radical novelty of the Second Yugoslavia and emphasizing the international antifascist solidarity of all Yugoslav people. Only through ideological struggle could ‘fidelity’13 to the event be created. Similar politico-ideological gestures can be registered in the movies of Soviet directors that had to re-enact the October Revolution for the masses (Eisenstein’s film October in 1921 or Medvedkin’s films). These instances likewise showed that it was with help of these aesthetical and ideological forms of mediation that both revolutions were actually rendered consumable for the masses.14

In the following, we depict the Yugoslav memorialization as part of a complex historical process that linked ideology, art, and politics, in which the political element – Yugoslav social revolution – ‘overdetermined’ the other two instances. Therefore, Yugoslav monuments must not only be regarded in their aesthetic quality, but rather be analyzed as internally linked to the revolutionary event of the partisan struggle.

We have indicated that the construction of memorial sites involved the Veterans’ Association and the League of Communists, but that does not mean that it followed a doctrine of socialist realism,15 which, as we will show below, was already in the 1950s substituted by Yugoslav modernism. However, we have good reasons to problematize the ideological effects of the project of partisan memorialization: The over-saturation of the partisan topic resulted in the emptying out of antifascism, which became an ossified official ideology16 without any power of mobilization. Hence, the dubious result of this cultural policy was the reconciliation of emancipatory politics with a truncated politics of memory. The question of how to mobilize the people without resorting to national criteria was not endorsed or practiced by any political agent in Yugoslavia.17 This pinpoints the exhaustion of Yugoslavia as a revolutionary event and the historical defeat of the Left. However, dissidents claimed that the dissolution of the official memory was engendered by the loosening of repressive force in the 1980s, thereby suggesting that the Yugoslav façade of ‘brotherhood and unity’ collapsed with the death of Tito. Apart from this crude psychologization of history, which reduces complex historical processes to individual disposition, the dissidents and liberals tend to disregard the fruits of their own labor: It was precisely dissidents and other national political forces, which initiated an ideological battle that fuelled and sutured the ideological universe to nationalism. The dissidents, liberals and parts of communist elites succeeded in repressing the historical memory of the antifascist legacy, while at the same time the nationalist stories of ‘eternal ethnic hatreds’ (re)surfaced signifying that Yugoslavia was only an artificial entity doomed to fail. The finale of Yugoslavia was executed, internally and externally.18 The politics of antifascist memory was transformed into a reinvention of a politics of ethnic memory and reconciliation, which prepared the grounds for the bloody break-up of the country. The dissident Medals of Honor were awarded with post-Yugoslav independence and wars.

On the one hand, we agree with the dissident statement that we must not search for a presupposed autonomy of art in the partisan memorials and films. On the other hand, we maintain that we can affirm this position by, first, rejecting an ideological assumption of art as an autonomous sphere and, second, by advocating an alternative view on the memorialization of antifascism in Yugoslavia, according to which it was not simply imposed from above but rather a site of permanent ideological struggle. By tackling the following alternative: socialist autonomy in the arts or socialist state art,19 things become a bit more intricate.

Since we recapitulated the antifascist politics of memory from a more statist viewpoint so far, the focus shall now be switched to those works of art that broke with the mainstream canon of memorial sites. Admittedly, our task is not easy. How to envision aesthetical novelty and art autonomy on a plane which is saturated with politics, ideology, and art? The path already trodden by art theorists as well as philosophers evaluating aesthetical dimensions and emancipatory practices uncared for until then such as, among others, Yugoslav cinema (e.g. Black Wave), graphics, performance and body arts (e.g. Marina Abramović). Those Yugoslav media (in the widest sense) had affected the ‘distribution of sensibility’ (Rancière), that has produced new sensorial experience and subsequently earned international recognition. Also, they were politically subversive within the Yugoslav context and provided a model of artistic organization many times copied by consequent artistic movements. Departing from this line of argumentation, we ask ourselves how to rethink the Yugoslav politics of memory? Could the field that is sutured by morality on the one hand (the figure of suffering) and the state politics of bearing witness on the other hand produce emancipatory effects or something ‘new’ with aesthetic means? The most regulated aesthetical form commissioned by the Veterans Association or Party contributing aesthetical novelty – isn’t this merely a nostalgic affirmation of the past?

As Žižić has already shown with Damnatio Memoriae, the fascinating memorial enterprise of Vojin Bakić was internationally received as an important artwork.20 But, here, we are less interested in his artwork per se or its purely artistic value. On the contrary, we will show how precisely politics intervened in the artwork, although not in a directly statist way. In other words, Bakić’s spatial artistic interventions produced political effects, i.e. they reconfigured the established relationship between politics and aesthetics in the realm of memorials.21

Vojin Bakić was one of the most important Yugoslav sculptors, working from the 1950s to the 1990s. He conceptualized and erected a series of antifascist monuments, which were part of Yugoslav modernism. Today, most of Bakić’s monuments are in a poor state, so that they represent sad sites of slow decay. Furthermore, explosives destroyed a number of them as in Gudovac, Karlovac, Bjelovar, Čizme, etc. One of his masterworks, which is partly preserved, was set up in 1981 and is located in Petrova Gora. The Petrova Gora monument commemorates Partisan resistance and the battle of 1942, where two hundred Serbian villagers were killed by Ustasha forces that were positioned on the top of the mountain. At first glance, the structure (see Figure 3) does not immediately summon up a typical antifascist monument. The precise meaning of the sculpture is not clear. Likewise, we do not glimpse any representation of suffering victims, antifascist victors, or a heroic partisan figure. Instead, the sculptural form is antifigurative and abstract. It completely negates the humanist moment of suffering or victory, but at the same time strategically touches the question of re-presentation and imagination of the partisan struggle.

What we see is a massive construction of steel, which is 37 meters high. From the massive platform rise oval structures with round shapes, which are constructed in four storeys that outgrow asymmetrically from one another. The sculptural work, or rather building, reminds us more of a space station or a space shuttle, which apart from a firm platform does not have any specific hierarchy that would bear a resemblance to a topdown pyramidal structure. The sculpture looks as if it has emerged from a different world. We could easily relate Bakić’s monument to Tatlin’s Tower to the Third International. It actually repeats the latter’s fundamental gesture by forcing the spectator to recognize a certain striving for the future, whereas at the same time it reasserts the utopian character of the antifascist community that formed and realized the event of Yugoslavia. Robert Burghardt nicely draws attention to this uncommon dimension of Yugoslav modernist monuments:

Sculpture commemorative of Partisans, located in The Petrova Gora. Photograph by Jan Kempenaers, by permission.
Figure 3: Sculpture commemorative of Partisans, located in The Petrova Gora. Photograph by Jan Kempenaers, by permission.

They open the scene for numerous associations; they could be ambassadors from far-away stars, or from a different, unrealised present. The openness which originates in the abstract language of the monuments is a visual manifestation of the emancipation from the Stalinist dominance of socialist realism in the eastern bloc, in which the future is represented only in a happy-overreaching form of the present. The monuments invoke a utopian moment, stick to aniconism, and translate the promise of the future into a universal gesture.22

Bakić’s monumental work opens a crucial parallel: couldn’t we relate this boldness, this aesthetic novelty also as something that was internal to the politics of partisan struggle? Compared to the pre-war situation, the partisan aesthetic had indeed rendered something radically new. From the point of view of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–1941) (and, we may add, also from the contemporary post-Yugoslav context), the antifascist struggle was something unimaginable, a ground-breaking event that created a new political community, which would be based on internationalist, non-ethnic criteria. The Yugoslav liberation struggle did not only bring about national liberation from the Nazi and fascist occupation, but also a socialist revolution, which broke with capitalist social relations. From the very beginning, the liberation struggle included the transformative dimension, the ‘not-yet-realized,’ ‘not yet there,’ the handling with the ‘Real.’23 The principal political idea underlying the partisan struggle was the axiom of equality for all who had fought against fascism and exploitation. Bakić’s monument evokes precisely this craziness, boldness, and novelty of revolutionary antifascist struggle.24

Yet, it is not only an analogy between the novelty of art and politics that we want to draw. Furthermore, we would like to show how both fields become reconstituted in the process, thereby acquiring new meanings. Our basic inspiration for this move is indebted to the lucid rendering of the relationship between art and politics by Jacques Rancière (2006). One of his key theses claims that art becomes ‘art’ only when it is identified with something that is not art. Memorial sites were the privileged investment of state politics. Usually, the genre of memorial war art was interwoven with a meta-narrative of victory or suffering which bounded art to ethics. Hence, also in the Yugoslav case, the bulk of war memorials testified to this ideological involvement and was formed according to the rules of the (socialist state art) genre.25 But as far as Bakić work is concerned, his monuments do not refer to any canonical iconic image of the ‘heroic partisan’ or a ‘suffering victim’ of fascist violence. The case of Petrova Gora refers to a utopian political community that was operative during WWII. The antifascist partisan struggle was aimed at establishing a new social structure, a new network of social relations that was historically a negation of fascism (see Močnik 2005). Moreover, this political community did not have only utopian dimension, but comprised of the real communist movement. The latter was a movement that would abolish the existing state of things, as Marx argued in German Ideology. Through the ‘impossible’ (trans)figuration of partisan and communist community, Bakić succeeded in reframing the sensorial experience signified by Yugoslav modernism. It produced a double effect: first, his sculpture broke with the already established standard of memorial production in Yugoslavia. What had been seen as the normal ‘distribution of the sensible’ was subverted by a discomforting presentation of antifascist struggle, by a spatial construction that provided room for differing interpretations. Against the socialist statist art approach, which had canonized the figure of the partisan, Bakić produced an abstract form, an antihumanist sculptural intervention. This innovation of memorial aesthetics betrays resemblances with other works as, for instance, those of Živković and Bogdanović, who together formed an art movement of memorial sites. Their artworks asserted the side of ‘not yet existing’ and – performatively – they rearticulated the artworks’ relationship to the world in a new fashion. The critique of the official ideological principles was one indicator, but likewise important was the political-symbolic layer, which addressed the public in a new way. Their unusual outlook did not indicate a clear ideological reference but forced the spectator to reflect upon its meaning and connection with antifascist struggle. However, the abstract nature of the monument has something in common with the abstract nature of partisan politics, i.e. a politics that rests on the principle of equality and that was imbued with a particular missionary zeal. Another significant political dimension that had usually been reflected in memorial sites was the articulation of agency of partisan struggle. As mentioned before, no such indication was rendered in Bakić’s memorial. Rather, agency here becomes identified – in the characteristic new modernist style – with the fleeting mass of anonymous partisan fighters.

Against the moralization and humanization of memorial sites, we witness a revolutionary politics of aesthetics. A lesson to be learned from this memorial, which is supported by Rancière’s theoretical position, is the following: the alternative between socialist state art and socialist autonomy is false. Artistic rupture always brings something new into the world, new sensorial experience, and by doing so it is detached from the recognized ‘distribution of the sensible’ or existing artistic canons (state art). However, art cannot be seen as the only form of life that would conserve the emancipatory promise to transcend ‘dirty’ reality. Artistic autonomy is not the protector of the failure of emancipatory politics, which sooner or later can get consolidated in the state power, as Adorno suggested (Rancière 2006). Bakić’s work thus created a certain interval, a gap between official state ideology and mainstream artistic expression, a rift between socialist realism and autonomy of art, which made visible what was not visible before. Only through the ‘impossible’ presentation of the partisan masses and sculptural novelty does his work succeed in re-animating or sustaining fidelity to the Yugoslav feat. By evoking the past, Bakić opened up the vision of the future: His insistence on the emancipatory past compels us to act in the present. This was achieved by means of a certain artistic strategy that is, without being directly political (in terms of who the represented object/subject is) and without ascribing a presupposed ‘artistic’ dimension (the established canon of ethics and socialist realism), but only by resort to his brilliant detour was Bakić able to produce the ‘thinking partisan monument.’ The monument, however, ‘is’ not an ethical herald of the future, but already ‘claims’ the future which the sculptor wants to follow upon the partisan gesture of international solidarity. Yet, the contemporary memory discourse in Slovenia reveals a strategy diametrically opposed to the emancipatory politics of aesthetics transmitted by the case of Bakić.

2. The Slovenian Reconciliation as Oblivion of the Socialist Revolution and the Antifascist Struggle

The Partisan movement on the one side and the era of WWII on the other remained at the heart of the public discussions about Slovenia’s past. Steeped in the official ideology during socialism, the interpretations of history are now anchored in diametrically opposed views on what had happened. To be more concrete, we may trace the indicated ideological division to the Partisan viewpoint on the one side and the position of the so-called Domobranci (Home Guard) on the other.26 Today, the political class is unified in downplaying the revolutionary nature of the constitution of Yugoslavia and the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. The master signifier of the late 1980s debates has been ‘reconciliation,’ which called upon all Slovenians to recognize the guilty parties and, at long last, to learn to live in harmony, in a future free of traumas and upsetting memories. However, it soon turned out that the ghosts from the past were still continuing to haunt the present.

What has happened to the Partisan heritage and monuments on the Slovene territory in the 1990s? Compared to the politics of destruction in Croatia manifested above, the politics of memory in Slovenia has taken a more subtle twist. This does not mean, however, that Slovenia was immune to more aggressive techniques of domination that gave a foothold to rightwing ideologies. Among other things, the debate on recent history has bred the introduction of the ‘passive victims discourse’ and a hunt for the criminals of the former ‘totalitarian regime.’27 The ultimate goal of this debate is the rehabilitation of the Domobranci and consequently, ‘national reconciliation,’ which in the words of Rastko Močnik betrays the ideology of the ruling class (2003). The first institution to venerate the Domobranci as well as anticommunism was the Catholic Church, which was supported by rightwing political parties. In their quest for ‘truth’ they received a huge boost by the erection of new monuments. In consequence, we can today find memorials to the Domobranci killed during and after the war side-byside to Partisan monuments. The differences between Domobranci and Partisan monuments in Slovenia can be explained by the manner of presenting the victims/victors and their specific treatment of history. We will present two exemplary memorial sites, which will illustrate these differences.

Figure 4 depicts a sculpture of four partisans emerging from a larger block of sculpture. It was created in 1976 by Boris Kobe and Stojan Batič in collaboration with Ive Šubic, who contributed the mosaic murals. It is located in Dražgoše and commemorates the historical site of the first open battle between a small battalion of 200 partisans (known as Cankar’s Battalion) and a massive German military force of more than 3000 soldiers. By the end of 1941, partisans in the Northern parts of Slovenia were engaged in political and military resistance mobilization. When the occupying forces learned of these activities, they immediately launched an offensive strike. After a three-day battle, which lasted from 9 to 11 January 1942, the German army conquered the village followed by its total destruction. In the wake of the defeat, the majority of the villagers had either been killed or deported to concentration camps. The Partisans, who had resorted to guerilla tactics against the outnumbering German troops, sought refuge in the nearby hills and successively strengthened their political and military activities in that region. This event eventually prevented the Slovenian region of Gorenjska to become annexed to the Third Reich.28

Partisan memorial, located in Dražgoše, erected in 1976 by Boris Kobe and Stojan Batič. Photograph ©Nada Kirn, by permission.
Figure 4: Partisan memorial, located in Dražgoše, erected in 1976 by Boris Kobe and Stojan Batič. Photograph © Nada Kirn, by permission.

The figure shows an archetypal depiction of partisans in strong and vigorous poses. In contrast to Bakić’s monument, this memorial site exposes all the typical features of war monuments. The partisans are depicted with bulky hands and weapons ready to be used. We may imagine them discussing plans for defending their position and attacking the enemy, or how to get away from the besieged area. They are portrayed as dynamic and likewise disciplined in their cause to fight oppression.29 Determination is a feature commonly referred to in the representation of partisan fighters. Presumably, the communist leadership took up this motif for the sake of conservation of this heroic zeal and of transmitting the readiness to sacrifice to all future generations, since both dispositions could potentially secure the status of the state. The partisan struggle became a starting event of socialist Yugoslavia, but at the same time it was the official ideology that sustained communist power.

The group sculpture is set within a larger commemorative arrangement, which also comprises a trail, another large sculpture, and a mural site. As is quite typical with partisan monuments, they feature antifascist slogans referring to the historical circumstances of the occupation and the war. They could yet be indicative either of a triumphalistic (‘To the people’s heroes’) or victimological (‘To the victims of the fascist occupation’) narration. The Dražgoše memorial site is still one of the most visited in Slovenia, now celebrating the liberation struggle as the constitutive element of Slovenian nationhood.

Domobranci memorial erected in Kočevski Rog in 1998. Photograph © Manca Bajec, by permission.
Figure 5: Domobranci memorial erected in Kočevski Rog in 1998. Photograph © Manca Bajec, by permission.

In contrast to the heroic nature of partisan monuments, the suffering dimension dominates the Domobranci memorials. Figure 5 captures a typical Domobranci memorial erected in Kočevski Rog in 1998. It commemorates the post-war executions of Domobranci. It bears the inscription: “Odpusti” (Forgive). The reference to morality and the Catholic Church is transparent and emphasized with a cross in front of the monument. Most of the Domobranci memorials, like this particular one, are situated in noiseless surroundings. Placed in the stillness of a forest, as a home for the fallen, lacking pomposity, they seem to avoid any concrete historical reference. The memorial statue gives indication of the moral element of depoliticized suffering; it appeals to piety and forgiveness as if the civil war had transhistorical and eternal character. The monument thus participates in the humble glorification of the victims of war and post-war executions. As with the majority of Domobranci memorials, this particular one also insists upon representing the victim rather than a particular collaborator, but more generally a crucified Slovenian nation that suffered from civil war during WWII. Instead of conveying any historical facts, it transposes the memory to the post-war era: from the fascist occupation to the civil war, or rather to the post-war executions. In this way, the political subjectivity of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle is discounted altogether. Rather, the spectator is reminded at post-war executions committed by an evil totalitarian regime. Less moralistic inscriptions can also be found on Domobranci memorials, the most popular being: “Mother, Homeland, God” and “Victims of revolutionary violence.” The first slogan embodies precisely the essence of political ideology that functioned in the first pre-war Yugoslavia, which was based on Serbian and Yugoslav unitarism, conservativism and the Church. The second slogan introduces morality also on the fascists’ side and is already framed in the critique of totalitarian discourse. All of these conservative inscriptions do not present the Domobranci as active protagonists, but as victims, who found themselves collaborating. These memorials share in the basic pessimistic assumption that taking sides was more of a matter of coincidence or fate than of political conviction and thought. This, however, poses at least two problems: one is the positive interpretation of the Domobranci as passive and innocent victims; the second is given with the absence of an integral historical context of WWII.

We may conclude that the Slovenian WWII memorials are structured like the contemporary mainstream political discourse, i.e. they are divided between advocacy of the Partisan movement on the one side and Domobranci on the other. While the former position ‘passively’ defends certain aspects of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle, the latter actively denounces the post-war ‘totalitarian’ terror, which is, of course, foisted upon the communist leadership. Although the two camps are opposed, they share a common goal in the debate – reconciliation. A reconciliation of the Slovenian nation is achieved through the ritualistic bemoaning of the victims of both sides. Instead of the egalitarian community of partisans, which was not a national community but the community of everyone that joined the struggle against fascism and struggling for new world, the reconciliation discourse launches a nationalized subject. The monuments play the crucial role of wrapping the debate in a cloak of dignity and respect for the spirits of the dead. It is in the national interest to appease political passions and to write a more ‘objective’ history which confirms that ‘we all belong to One Nation,’ rather than to maintain the division between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ However, reconciliation does not have the same meaning for both sides. While both agree that the post-war executions and collaboration with the enemy were problematic, reconciliation nonetheless goes along with passing over the historical significance of the Partisan movement for the constitution of Yugoslavia. At worst, reconciliation comes close to rehabilitation of fascism and Domobranci. Domobranci and Partisans are put on the same footing and the allegedly ‘totalitarian’ regime that resulted from the Partisan liberation struggle and resistance becomes consequently condemned. Also, Domobranci emerge as the moral winner that had nothing to do with the criminal post-war regime from the reconciliation discourse. Hence, reconciliation can be possible if we become ashamed of our communist past and come to condone fascism. The political maxim of the Domobranci supporters could be termed in the following way: “Let us reconcile with the fascist past. The Domobranci committed some crimes during the war, but so did the communist regime afterwards.” For supporters of the Partisan standpoint, on the other hand, reconciliation means acknowledging the post-war executions and praising a certain aspect of the politics of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. It is a defense of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle as the core of Slovenian nationhood, as if the struggle had only been about national independence. In this way, both versions of reconciliation discourse, the Partisan and the Domobranci version, produce a twofold effect: a reduction of the significance of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle for the history of the Slovenian nation-state and a conviction of basically everything that followed from WWII until the end of the 1980s. The reconciliation discourse30 thus completely relativizes the debates about the Yugoslav socialist project and aims at erasing all revolutionary traces of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. If the Slovenian memorial policy did not destroy antifascist monuments as occurred in Croatia, it still produced the alike political effects with other means.

We must admit, though, that not the entire history of the Yugoslav revolution was effaced from the public discourse: even though it is moralized, there is a revolutionary trace, which persists as a remainder. The advocates of the ‘new truth,’ the Domobranci supporters, have structured the debate around that motif. This trace also betrays the chief traumatic kernel of the debate: the post-war killings of the revolutionary ‘totalitarian’ terror. Despite the historical incorrectness of this argument, which we have already spelled out, one truth has been – paradoxically – confirmed. The post-war killings were part of the revolutionary terror, but there was no totalitarian regime at that time. Firstly, any serious historical study can assert that Yugoslavia was a type of authoritarian state (the undemocratic rule of the League of Yugoslav Communists), which on some levels (economy, culture) practiced a relative freedom (self-management, worker’s participation, local communities). Secondly, revolution cannot simply be equated with totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt repeatedly contended. If revolution was the destruction of the ancien regime and if revolution ensued under the conditions of war, as had in fact occurred in WWII Yugoslavia, one could not avoid violence (Badiou 2005). We are, of course, not suggesting to exculpate excessive and repressive operations carried out by the Communist Party during and after the war.31 There were different ways to prevent violence and excesses, but this was not on the agenda of Liberation Struggle. However, the present-day defenders of the collaborationists (Domobranci) are not interested in Political Theory or historical discussions about the emergence of Yugoslavia and problems of liberation struggle, but rather in revising Slovenian history, counting the bodies and condemnation of the ‘criminals.’32 When all criminals will be condemned, reconciliation will be possible. In the light of this moralizing re-articulation, the Partisan side has been pushed to the corner. It has passively accepted the guilt and accepted the terrain of the moralizing discourse. Instead of yielding a firm defense against such charges by hinting at the transitory side-effects of antifascist struggle, the Partisan side has backed down into defending merely the national aspect of the resistance struggle. The outcome of the portrayed national debates, which will be lawfully mandatory, is to be resolved by the Slovenian Parliament in 2010. Yet, it cannot be expected that this will put an end to the public discussions about an adequate memorial policy.


3. Rethinking the Partisan Liberation Struggle as Socialist Revolution

We do not need to pinpoint the Domobranci’s guilt or moral responsibility for their crimes during WWII. In the previous sections, we have outlined the way the Domobranci defenders were successful in displacing the debate into the realm of moralizing and transhistorical discourse, thereby distorting the historical circumstances of antifascist resistance. In no way can the Domobranci’s support for the old Yugoslavia and the fascist occupation forces be reasonably equated with the revolutionary Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. The Partisans were recognized as part of the broad coalition of antifascist forces from 1943 onwards. The Domobranci’s collaboration with the fascist and Nazi occupation forces predates the post-war executions.

How to understand the novelty of partisan antifascist struggle and defend their cause vis-à-vis collaboration? We will try to present our case with the help of Alain Badiou’s insights delivered in the prologue to his Metapolitics (2005). Starting from a different historical conjuncture, Badiou poses the question of what made people join the French Resistance. Two tendencies predominate in the context of the revisionist discussions in France. One proclaims that wartime France was Pétainist, i.e. collaborators, at worst knowingly, collaborated with the occupiers, or, in the more moderate interpretation, collaboration is seen as a matter of pragmatism. It was better to wait and not to resist. The other tendency is antifascist and declares France to have been ‘resistant.’ Here, one can distinguish between two different lines of reasoning, which, according to Badiou, do not suffice for thinking politics. One trend (represented, for instance, in Sartre) depicts the voting for the Resistance in terms of a personal decision, that is, a moral choice and a matter of an individual’s conscience or, in Badious’s terminology, based upon the ‘subjectivity of opinion.’ The other, communist interpretation reduces Resistance support to an objective fact. Here, class affiliation is depicted as a disposition to join the Resistance. According to Badiou, choice can neither be conceived of as a collective imperative (objectivity) nor as a personal decision (the subjectivity of opinion) relative to moral attitude and external to the situation itself. In Badiou’s words,

this resistance, proceeding by logic, is not an opinion. Rather it is a logical rupture with dominant and circulating opinions [. . .]. [T]he Resistance was neither a class phenomenon nor an ethical phenomenon. (2005: 5–6)

In short, resistance is a rupture with the existing situation. To be more concrete:

When all is said and done, all resistance is a rupture in thought, through the declaration of what the situation is, and the foundation of a practical possibility opened up through this declaration. (ibid., 8)

To think, under the conditions of WWII, meant risking, i.e. risking thought and opening the bounds of possibility toward the Real, the impossible. To think inevitably meant joining the Resistance. Those who did not think remained tied to that situation, a situation that blocked any risk-taking. Badiou sums this up axiomatically: “Not to resist is not to think. Not to think is not to risk risking” (ibid.). Positing politics as thought, which for Badiou is material and has material effects, gives us a different frame of reference for understanding the issue of the antifascist struggle itself.

Apart from this equating of politics and thought, we should delve deeper into the complexity of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Liberation Struggle.33 To be clear, both historical instances of resistance, the French and the Yugoslav, share a universalistic thrust and were part of the same international struggle against fascism, but at the same time they generated different political consequences. It is not that the Yugoslav Liberation Struggle was morally superior from the French Resistance, but it had indeed produced a major rupture with pre-war Yugoslavia. The French Resistance was disbanded and disarmed after the war. Hence, it did not have lasting consequences in terms of giving raise to new political forms and institution. In other words, it did not transform social relations from pre-war France. It remained a nation-state in the core capitalist system. In contrast, the Yugoslav Partisan struggle achieved, in addition to national liberation, also a social revolution, which brought a definitive rupture with the old Yugoslavia. The Peoples’ Liberation Struggle was not merely resistance, but a revolutionary event, which transformed social and national relations of pre-war Yugoslavia. Finally, along with it went a cultural revolution that had unleashed immense creativity potentials by warranting the masses to enter the sphere of culture (see Komelj 2009). Already during the war, the Partisans had been successful in building up political institution in the liberated territories such as the people’s councils of antifascist struggle, which organized cultural events (theater, painting, and poetry), educational infrastructure, political meetings to mobilize masses and basic conditions for economy. To engage the population in the resistance struggle was of vital importance to the new revolutionary government (AVNOJ 1943). The Yugoslav struggle bore long-term consequences and cannot be grasped without accounting for the dynamics induced by the class contradictions of the old Yugoslavia. As indicated, the constitution of the Second Yugoslavia entailed three dimensions: (1) the international antifascist struggle as universal dimension, which was at the core of new Yugoslavia;34 (2) a social revolution, which accomplished the introduction of new class relations and a transition to communism;35 (3) a cultural revolution, which broke with the bourgeois canons and conception of art as an autonomous domain and provided for the entrance of the masses into the sphere of culture (see Komelj 2009). It is crucial to consider that national liberations occurred for the first time in all the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia. All nations were recognized.36 The anti-nationalist posture became one of the official struggle against fascism, but at the same time they generated different political consequences. It is not that the Yugoslav Liberation Struggle was morally superior from the French Resistance, but it had indeed produced a major rupture with pre-war Yugoslavia. The French Resistance was disbanded and disarmed after the war. Hence, it did not have lasting consequences in terms of giving raise to new political forms and institution. In other words, it did not transform social relations from pre-war France. It remained a nation-state in the core capitalist system. In contrast, the Yugoslav Partisan struggle achieved, in addition to national liberation, also a social revolution, which brought a definitive rupture with the old Yugoslavia. The Peoples’ Liberation Struggle was not merely resistance, but a revolutionary event, which transformed social and national relations of pre-war Yugoslavia. Finally, along with it went a cultural revolution that had unleashed immense creativity potentials by warranting the masses to enter the sphere of culture (see Komelj 2009). Already during the war, the Partisans had been successful in building up political institution in the liberated territories such as the people’s councils of antifascist struggle, which organized cultural events (theater, painting, and poetry), educational infrastructure, political meetings to mobilize masses and basic conditions for economy. To engage the population in the resistance struggle was of vital importance to the new revolutionary government (AVNOJ 1943).

The Yugoslav struggle bore long-term consequences and cannot be grasped without accounting for the dynamics induced by the class contradictions of the old Yugoslavia. As indicated, the constitution of the Second Yugoslavia entailed three dimensions: (1) the international antifascist struggle as universal dimension, which was at the core of new Yugoslavia;34 (2) a social revolution, which accomplished the introduction of new class relations and a transition to communism;35 (3) a cultural revolution, which broke with the bourgeois canons and conception of art as an autonomous domain and provided for the entrance of the masses into the sphere of culture (see Komelj 2009).

It is crucial to consider that national liberations occurred for the first time in all the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia. All nations were recognized.36 The anti-nationalist posture became one of the official guidelines of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia until the mid-1980s. The path towards communism was less successful, although an important contribution to the organization of society based on socialist principles was purveyed with the concept of ‘self-management.’ Also, Yugoslavia’s key role in the non-aligned movement should likewise not be overlooked.

Conclusion

From the 1990s onwards, the ideological state apparatuses were subjected to a veritable revision with degrading political effects. The public sphere became imbued with liberalist, nationalist and reconciliatory political schemes. As this paper has indicated, the most insistent nationalist programme was rendered with the revision of history in the sense of canonization of a ‘glorious national past’ and demonization of the Yugoslav past. In Slovenia, school curricula have recently been adapted or are cur rentlyunder review.37 One of the most exemplary illustrations of historical revisionism is undoubtedly rendered with the dramatic changes in the landscape of monuments. We have contrasted two different policies of memory: first, the Yugoslav memorialization of antifascist struggle and, second, the post-Yugoslav memorialization of segregated ethnic communities. In the wake of WWII the Yugoslav memory politics was characterized by a complicated intertwining of political, ideological, and artistic practices. The erection of monuments dealing with the Yugoslav event was not simply imposed from above, but accepted and negotiated by broad masses of the population. A number of memorial works such as those composed by artists like Bakić, Bogdanović, and Živković have contributed to the implementation of the revolutionary ideas into a particular aesthetic genre, i.e. ‘Yugoslav socialist modernism.’ With the help of this genre, the Yugoslav rupture was commemorated and the socialist ideas were represented in art and demarcated against existing forms of (bourgeois) art. In the same vein artists succeeded in erecting ‘true’ monuments to the Yugoslav Partisans that – in the nomenclature of Badiou – activated thought in ‘thinking monuments.’38

The post-Yugoslav politics of memory must be reckoned as symbolizing many of the challenges and contradiction inherited from the Yugoslav constellation: from the repression of everything that is ‘Yugoslav,’ the destruction politics against communist monuments, to the strategies of reconciliation of fascist and communist terror. The internationalist Yugoslav community was replaced with ethnically segregated communities. A bloody break-up of territories was rather the consequence of the coalition of liberal (technocrats) and nationalist ideologies (cultural intelligentsia, reformed communists) than a ‘natural’ consequence of an allegedly ‘totalitarian’ regime. To be clearer, it was an ‘anti-totalitarian,’ dissident ideological offensive that significantly contributed to the country’s dissolution. In opposition to the Yugoslav socialist politics of memory linked to revolutionary politics, the post-Yugoslav policies of memory must be linked with the rehabilitation of fascism and legitimization of ethnic cleansing.

The struggle for recognition of the antifascist past and the condemnation of fascists’ destruction of monuments is to be grounded not on moralistic, but on political grounds. It must go along with acknowledging the radical difference between the constitution of revolutionary Yugoslavia on the one hand and the preconditions of its bloody destruction on the other. To stress the revolutionary nature of the partisan struggle means to politicize and intervene in the contemporary national-moralistic discourse of reconciliation. We assess that only on the grounds of past emancipatory politics can we understand the dissolution of Yugoslavia as well as the current restorations. There are many further questions that would have to be addressed in this light, including how the extreme nationalists came to power in the late 1980s and were able to exercise a hegemonic domination within the ideological field; how and when the democratic ‘civil society’ became ‘nationalized;’ and what were the reasons for the destruction of Yugoslavia? Without addressing these questions and affirming the Yugoslav politics of emancipation we can only be content with the ideological post-Yugoslav train that is heading for the end of history.

Footnotes

  1. We should not overlook the fact that in Yugoslavia, neoliberal agenda started due to the implementation of IMF conditions already in the beginning of the 1980s. On the analysis of detrimental effects of IMF on Yugoslavia, see Cathérine Samary (1988), Branka Magaš (1993), and Susane Woodward (1995). ↩︎
  2. See also, from a different disciplinary angle, Miklavž Komelj’s chapter, this volume. ↩︎
  3. Tomaž Mastnak lucidly described how the civil society became “totalitarianism from below” (1987). ↩︎
  4. For a more detailed critical analyses of dissident discourses see Močnik (2003) and Buden (2001). ↩︎
  5. If the countries of the former socialist bloc found their ‘natural’ enemy in the Soviet Union and simply equalized Soviet imperialism with communism, the Yugoslav situation was much more complex. The most developed parts of the federation, Slovenia and Croatia, ijired a critique of centralism, whereas other parts like Serbia launched their nationalist campaign at the expense of the autonomy of the regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Nationalism had emerged as a primary ideological site within the Yugoslav domain only in the mid-1980s. We deem the question of how it was linked to the political and economical ijield as pertinent and still unresolved. Thereby, one would have to start from the premise that nationalism was not only a project from above, but rather (re)produced in everyday life, among the masses. ↩︎
  6. ‘Lustration’ was the most prominent dissident political ambition, which comprised the cleansing of all Party members from ofijicial posts. In other words, lustration was a means to exchange the political class. We would, of course, have to acknowledge the differences in scale and intensity of these processes within the countries of former socialist block. In some states, these anticommunist policies were extremely fervent (for instance the Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic), whereas in other states the former communist parties democratized and participated in the reconciliation and transition processes (like in the case of Slovenia). ↩︎
  7. The optimistic and romantic view of the past is commodiijied in the nostalgic mode. ‘Yugonostalgia’ or ‘Ostalgia’ should be seen in both ways as Western phantasm and as a product of Eastern countries. ↩︎
  8. This occurred in Serbia with the granting of pensions to particular groups of Chetniks, but this phenomenon could likewise be observed in Italy, where the same policy was applied to some fascist sections. ↩︎
  9. The phrase Damnatio memoriae describes a political practice in Ancient Rome. Traitors were excluded from the Roman urbs and all historical traces of their existence were erased. In this way, the honor of Rome was preserved. The Senate, or later an Emperor, could apply this strategy to condemn their predecessors and seize their property and remake or destroy the monuments of the condemned. ↩︎
  10. Franjo Tudjman was president of Croatia in the years during and after the war in Croatia. ↩︎
  11. Žižić does not take into account what is to be done with the monuments commemorating fascist past. This is of vital importance in the context of the handling of the historical revisionist movements in Spain or Slovenia. ↩︎
  12. As Althusser showed, ideology must not only be regarded as a mere imaginary representation, but rather as practice. Here, ideological rituals (everyday or symbolic ceremonial repetitions), indeed, are of crucial importance. See his essay on ideological state apparatuses (2008). ↩︎
  13. Here, we are touching a problem that Badiou’s theory of politics is concerned with, because it does not address ideology to a larger extent. Our attempt of conceiving memorial sites is aimed at linking politics and ideology simultaneously. ↩︎
  14. In Yugoslavia, it were not only memorial sites, but also movies – the partisan genre became the most popular movie genre –, which would create an ideological tie between the Yugoslav people and the event of socialist Yugoslavia and partisan struggle. While it is true that partisan ijilms did not reach the aesthetic level of Soviet cinematography, they were, however, equally important for the creation of the event. On the other side, they should not be seen as pure propaganda ijilms but much more as a popular genre of ‘Yugo-Western.’ ↩︎
  15. See Pavle Levi’s discussion on the end of socialist realism in Yugoslavia, which already emerged in the wake of the critique of Stalinism in the 1950s (2007). Ever since, artists could enjoy a relative freedom of expression and that was also afijirmed by a large production of alternative ijilms, graphics, sculpture works, etc. ↩︎
  16. Some works, such as those composed by Laibach (NSK), which employed a strategy of overidentiijication with fascist symbols, succeeded in subverting the ofijicial ideology. Even though these artistic practices showed the (non)functioning of empty formulas of instances of power (Party, Yugoslav People’s Army, etc.), we need to stress how different the conjuncture of the 1980s was from the 1990s. Also, art produced particular effects which could be arguably assigned either to alternative political practices or to nationalistic agendas. Could we then retroactively read NSK and particularly Laibach’s critique of Yugoslav ideology as the other, alternative side of the Slovenian path to independence? See also Komelj’s chapter, this volume. ↩︎
  17. The role of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and the federal authorities will not be discussed here. Let us only mention that they both slipped into deep political crisis and taken a passive stand instead of formulating their own politics. ↩︎
  18. Since we do not have enough space here to delve into the causes for the break-up, or rather the destruction, of Yugoslavia, let us just mention a good summary review of the literature and arguments presented by Sabrina Ramet (2005). ↩︎
  19. This alternative appeared in different versions in discussions between Lenin and Bogdanov, where they addressed the question of cultural transformation: destruction of the bourgeois past or constitution of the socialist culture? For a detailed discussion, see Sachor (1988). ↩︎
  20. There are some other important artists,who produced similar modernist memorials such as Bogdan Bogdanović and Miodrag Živković since the 1960s. See an interactive map: http://fzz.cc/issue02PART.html. As Robert Burghardt comments on the webpage: “[T]hose monuments have an abstract, often monumental, but always unusual and peculiar formal vocabulary in common.” ↩︎
  21. We are inspired by Miklavž Komelj’s analysis of partisan art during WWII (2009) and
    indepted to Jacques Rancière’s depiction of the relation of aesthetics and politics (2006). ↩︎
  22. http://fzz.cc/issue02PART.html. 27.5. ↩︎
  23. We will return to this later. For a more detailed account on Yugoslavia as socialist revolution and event see Komelj (2009) and Pupovac (2008). ↩︎
  24. See also a thesis put forward by Branimir Stojanović (2003) on the status of the Yugoslav revolutionary war, which articulated a different answer to both Nazi total war and to the collaborationism of old forces. ↩︎
  25. Komelj shows how after WWII intellectual circles slowly began to adopt bourgeois criteria of art and advocated the (liberal) notion of ‘autonomy of art.’ This tendency was fought by a hard-line Communist party with a revised Socialist realism, or subsumption of art under politics. These were both ideological positions, which tended to erase the legacy of the partisan art rupture (2009). ↩︎
  26. The ‘Home Guard,’ or, in Slovenian, Domobranci, collaborated with the German occupation forces and fought against the Partisans in Slovenia. Before the Domobranci, the White Guard joined forces with Italian troops which capitulated in 1943. A civil war ensued in virtually all parts of Yugoslavia during the WWII. ↩︎
  27. For a critique of the theories of totalitarianism, see Žižek (2001). In the 2007/08 academic year, the Workers’-Punks’ University (Ljubljana, Slovenia) organized a series of lectures that critically assessed the role and central theses of theories on totalitarianism. They are documented on: http://dpu.mirovni-institut.si/11letnik/Totalitarizem.php. ↩︎
  28. We must not forget that the Republic of Užice, a territory liberated by Yugoslav partisans in Serbia, and Dražgoše in Slovenia were the only liberated territories in the occupied Europe in 1941. ↩︎
  29. Partisan discipline and strong political convictions were held as very important characteristics of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. Without bearing this determined belief in national liberation and social revolution in mind, it is impossible to understand the zeal and resilience of the partisan struggle. The situation of occupation and collaboration, with a massive military presence, made the partisan struggle impossible to grasp. ↩︎
  30. Miklavž Komelj (2008) pointed out that ‘national reconciliation’ was a key dimension in Ciril Žabot’s fascist national programme of breaking up Yugoslavia. National reconciliation has a reactionary background, stemming from a biological conception of ‘nation;’ it was reactivated during the 1980s. A very interesting thesis on the contextualization of national reconciliation was also put forward by Lev Centrih: “In the broadest sense, it has been understood as a call for the mutual recognition and respect of all sides engaged in the conflict, on the grounds that they all belong to the same motherland, to the same Nation, even though they may perceive their devotion differently and are marked by errors and crimes. Nation and motherland have been perceived as pre-given qualities of every individual, that is, as essentially separate from one’s afijiliations to political, production, or ideological practices” (2008: 70–71). ↩︎
  31. There were certainly different ways of dealing with fascists at the end of the war. The post-war killings were consequences of personal revenge, revolutionary terror with war tribunals that rapidly liquidated fascists. After WWII, many fascist collaborators that fled to Austria were sent back to Yugoslavia by British forces. Some of them were imprisoned, while the majority of them had been killed. ↩︎
  32. In his speech at the closing ceremony in Teharje (5 October 2008), the Bishop of Celje, Anton Stres, said that all crimes had perpetrators and that these should be named. For more information, see: http://www.rtvslo.si/modload.php?&c_mod=rnews&op=sections&func=read&c_menu=1&c_id=184117&tokens=stres. ↩︎
  33. We share the important contribution to understanding politics by Badiou. His thesis on the correlation between thought and politics can explain the historical fact of young people joining the Partisans en masse, although not all of them had been members of the Communist Party; they did, however, think the situation from both the national and the revolutionary perspective. Another thing to be added here is that the antifascist ijight in Slovenia was not exclusively headed by the Communist Party; rather, it was a mass political movement of the Liberation Front (Osvobodilna fronta). ↩︎
  34. Yugoslavia had not been a nation and did not have one national language. See Buden(2003). ↩︎
  35. See Kirn (2009) and Pupovac (2006). ↩︎
  36. Yet, the issue of Kosovo Albanians was unresolved also in the new Yugoslavia. The idea of a Socialist Balkan Federation, which would eliminate the substance of ‘Southern Slavs’ (Yugoslavia), was suppressed by both Stalin and Churchill; in this way, the burning question of the division of Albanians among several countries was avoided, a question that remains open to this day. Detailed information on the idea of this Balkan federation is provided by Samary (1988). ↩︎
  37. We have not touched upon the case of Bosnia, where the recent war and nationalistic effects are manifest. Similarly, the chances for reconciliation in Kosovo cannot be foretold. ↩︎
  38. For an interesting psychoanalytical reading of Geertz’s ‘anti-monuments’, see Wajcman (1998). ↩︎

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