The Dudik Memorial Complex: Commemoration and Changing Regimes in the Contested City of Vukovar

Abstract

Memorials can become viewed as the detritus of past regimes or simply as objects which no longer ‘fit’ in the new socio-political landscape. This chapter explores the biography of the Dudik memorial complex in Vukovar, Croatia. Commemorating crimes committed during the Second World War, this memorial has been hallowed, rejected, and used as a symbol of reconciliation and as a site of resistance. Its status of a ‘memorial in flux’ continues to challenge local conceptions of heritage and contemporary political narratives. From 1941 to 1943 the area of Dudik served as an execution ground where individuals accused of aiding and abetting the Partisans (predominantly Serbs) were put to death by Croat forces. After several attempts at memorialisation, in 1980 Bogdan Bogdanovic, one of Yugoslavia’s premier memorial designers, converted the site into a key node in the Yugoslav memorialscape. In 1991, the siege of Vukovar—the harbinger of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia—was followed by the expulsion of the Croat population. For Croats, Vukovar was transformed into the ‘Hero City’ of the fledgling state. As a memorial to the victims of the ‘other’, Dudik has been progressively marginalised by the city’s ‘Homeland War’ memorial boom. After its partial conversion into a football field, a heterogenous group has appropriated and restored some of the Dudik memorial complex. In this ethnically divided city in ‘conflict time’, Dudik challenges the political status quo and highlights the fragility of memorials as permanent loci of commemoration.