Mediated remembrance: local practices of remembering the Second World War in Tito's Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article explores practices of collective war remembrance in the socialist Yugoslavia. Memory of the Second World War in Yugoslavia has often been described as ‘frozen’, and this is seen as having led to the eruption of formerly suppressed memories at the end of the 1980s. To challenge this assumption, the author studies the negotiation of practices of collective war remembrance in Yugoslavia, and highlights the dynamic character of war remembrance even under the circumstances of state-controlled public remembering. Two examples are explored: practices of erecting local war monuments during the 1950s, and the emergence and activities of ‘fictive kinship groups’ struggling for public acknowledgement of a site of memory for the victims of the Jasenovac former Concentration Camp in Croatia.