Staging the Holocaust in the Land of Brotherhood and Unity: Holocaust Drama in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

THIS article considers two theatrical works written by Dorde Lebovic (1928-2004), premiered in Socialist Yugoslavia in the mid-1950s and 1960s: Nebeski odred (The Heavenly Squad, 1957, co-authored with Aleksandar Obrenovi6) and Viktorija (Viktorija, 1968). Not only was Lebovic the first playwright in Socialist Yugoslavia to bring the theme of the Holocaust to a larger audience, but his plays also addressed issues of Holocaust remembrance in a highly original and for that time often provocative manner. Although most of Lebovics plays were met with critical acclaim in Yugoslavia at the time of their staging and some of them were included in anthologies of contemporary Serbian drama as well as referred to in encyclopaedic overviews of modern drama,' his work has so far not attracted a great deal of scholarly interest. I propose to examine how Lebovics dramas mediated, shaped and circulated narratives of the destruction of European Jews against the background of the specific memory culture of Socialist Yugoslavia. After a brief discussion of Yugoslavia's politics of remembrance of the Second World War and of the Holocaust, I will take a closer look at both plays. I will not only explore how the plays, as works of fiction, represented the Shoah, but also how they, through their intervention in the public sphere, contributed to the emergence of Holocaust memory in Yugoslavia.