The cult of holy death in the socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

In Communist Yugoslavia there was a developed process of joint memory control through the glorification of war as ?the originator of the nation?. The symbol of the soldier?s readiness to sacrifice himself at the altar of the homeland became the subliminal memory of war, but also one of the clearest reflections of the present, which has created ideas of the past. In the process of creating the identity of the Yugoslav community, the key elements were represented by different types of memorialization of World War II and the glorification of sacrificing fallen Partisans. The official public memory as a model of society interpreted the present through the past. In that sense, the official policy of recollections encouraged the belief that the future would be better than the past and that the temporary present was just one of the stages of the progress.