19. In the Name of Father and Son: Remembering the First World War in Serbia

Abstract

This chapter examines Serbian soldiers' recollections as well as the development of the conflict's master narrative from 1918 to the turn of the twenty-first century. The Serbian case augments the Great War memories as it is fundamentally different to that of other belligerents: Serbia entered the conflict as an ethnically homogeneous state, but emerged from it as the preponderous plurality of an ethnically heterogeneous Yugoslavia, which politicized the conflict's commemoration in the interwar and post-1945 periods. The first part of the chapter examines the experiences and memories of Serbian war veterans, and charts the construction of the war's master narrative as a religious chronicle of crucifixion and resurrection. The second part examines the war's commemoration in the Yugoslav Kingdom, while third and four parts look at the suppression of those memories during the Communist era and their return during the national revival. Keywords: Communist; First World War; Serbia; Yugoslavia