The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution

ISBN-13: 9780367278045 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 188 str.

Jelena Đureinovic

Opis

Exploring the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and post-war retribution and focusing on the Chetnik movement, this book analyses the politics of memory.

Spis treści

1. Introduction

Collaboration, resistance and retribution in Yugoslavia

Memory politics in post-Milošević Serbia: between anti-communism and ethnicisation

The context of the book: postsocialism

Memory and law: Serbia’s pseudo-transitional justice

Approach

Outline

2. Exploring politics of memory

History of memory

Politicality of memory

State agency

Pluralities, struggles and layers

Post-Yugoslav Serbia as a case study

3. Yugoslav memory culture and its downfall

Yugoslav war memory

Main mnemonic agency

Reception of memory politics beyond compliance and rejection

Remembering the collaboration

When history outpoured

4. The Milošević era

Changes and continuities

The anti-communist opposition

Between the Chetnik revival and commemorations of the postwar retribution

Ravna Gora gatherings

5. Memory politics in post-Milošević Serbia

The war and its aftermath in the hegemonic narratives

Purging Yugoslavia from the public

National reconciliation: ending the civil war within the Serbian nation

Imaginations of the Chetniks

The Chetniks as victims of communism

6. Unearthing the past

The Mihailović Commission

The State Commission for Secret Graves

The quest for the grave of Dragoljub Mihailović

Informalities and failures of official fact-finding endeavours

7. Anti-communist memory politics from below

Symbolic nature of state efforts

Non-state actors

Commemorative practices from below

The symbolic power

8. History, memory and law

Equalising the Chetniks and the Partisans

Rehabilitation legislation

Telling histories in the courtroom

Judicial abolishment of the uprising

Rehabilitation from below

9. Rehabilitation of Dragoljub Mihailović

Agency behind the court case

The Second World War in the courtroom

Historians as expert witnesses

Interventions against the process

Discussing the 1946 trial

Plaintiffs’ claims summarised: the court decision

10. Conclusion

O autorze

Jelena Đureinović holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, where she teaches in the Department of History. Her research deals with the history and politics of memory of the Second World War in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space with the focus on the process of reinterpretation of the Chetnik movement in Serbia. She was a visiting research fellow at the Moore Institute in Galway, the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz and the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies in the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She has published on Europeanisation and memory politics, memory laws, discourses of victimhood under communism and relations between memory cultures in Croatia and Serbia.