The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia. Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution

This article examines the changing paradigms in the official politics of memory as linked to the rise of populism and authoritarian democracy in Serbia, focusing on the appropriation of the People’s Liberation Movement and the victory against fascism in the Second World War. The article places the memory of the Second World War in the framework of anticommunism and ethnicization as dominant prisms of historical interpretation within state-sanctioned memory politics in contemporary Serbia. Understanding the populist memory politics in Serbia as based on the dichotomy of heroism and victimhood, this article focuses on the heroic aspect of the dominant narratives as exemplified in the notion of Serbia’s liberation wars. The Victory Day and Day of Liberation of Belgrade are in focus as the most prominent commemorative events that illuminate the tendency of memory appropriation. After theoretical consideration about authoritarianism in Serbia, populism and memory politics and a brief background on the notion of liberation wars, the article moves on to the analysis of memory politics. The study is based on media discourses, state papers and observation of official commemorations and practices.

Part I. Framing the Issues 1. The politics of war memory and commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper Part II. Case Studies 2. Layers of memory: twenty years after in Argentina Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman 3. The South African War/Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 and political memory in South Africa Bill Nasson 4. National narratives, war commemoration, and racial exclusion in a settler society: the Australian case Ann Curthoys 5. 'This is where they fought': Finnish war landscapes as a national heritage Petri J. Raivo 6. Remembered/Replayed: the nation and male subjectivity in the Second World War films, Ni Liv (Norway) and The Cruel Sea (Britain) Peter Sjolyst-Jackson 7. Postmemory cinema: second-generation Israelis screen the Holocaust in Don't Touch My Holocaust Yosefa Loshitzky 8. Hauntings: memory, fiction, and the Portuguese Colonial Wars Paulo de Medeiros 9. Longing for war: nostalgia and Australian returned soldiers after the First World War Stephen Garton 10. Involuntary commemorations: post-traumatic stress disorder and its relationship to war commemoration Jo Stanley Part III. Debates and Reviews 11. War commemoration in Western Europe: changing meanings, divisive loyalties, unheard voices T.G. Ashplant

Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

Today, in the conditions of a full-scale brutal war unleashed by the Russian Federation, Ukraine is experiencing the greatest upheaval since the World War ІІ. The memory of the previous war on Ukrainian territory played and continues to play a significant role in the scientific, political, and cultural spheres. The purpose of this article is to highlight the main aspects of the study of the memory of the Second World War in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war (since 2014). We believe, that the proposed directions are relevant today and in the future. Before the Revolution of Dignity and the beginning of the Russian aggression in 2014, post (Soviet) and national narratives of the politics and culture of remembrance of the Second World War existed simultaneously in the Ukrainian discourse. After the mentioned events, and especially after the legally enshrined refusal of using the term "Great Patriotic War" and other changes, the national paradigm of war memory was finally established. There have been decisive changes in the politics of memory, historical politics, commemorative practices, the teaching of the events of World War II history in school, etc. This article proposes and briefly analyzes problems that, in our opinion, may be of interest to Ukrainian and foreign researchers of enshrined refusal memory, memory politics, historical politics, etc. That is Euromaidan, the beginning of Russian aggression and a rethinking of the previous paradigm of commemoration of the war, in particular the "decommunization laws" of 2015. The impact of a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, legislative changes in 2023. Russian instrumentalization of commemoration of the Second World War in the conditions of hybrid and full-scale wars and the Ukrainian response. "Places of memory" dedicated to the war in urban space and changes in commemorative practices. Memory of the Second World War in toponymy - the dynamics of changes. Images of war in the educational process, etc.

If an uninformed visitor to Serbia were to have looked at the daily press in recent years, he or she could have easily reached the conclusion that the Second World War was still going on, and that the confusion of the civil war continued, and even that the eventual winner was still uncertain. Sympathizers of the movements which fought on the territory of Serbia between 1941 and 1945 forcefully advocate the ideas and goals of their past heroes, and heated debate between them is, through the media, transported into the public domain, thus elevating the already high passions of Serbian public opinion. While historiography is mostly quiet, ‘the battle for the truth about the Second World War’ is being fought on the level of most state institutions as well as in textbooks. Over the past ten years, the Second World War has been a topic addressed by mayors, prime ministers, presidents of the country, the National Assembly and the government, prosecutors, and the courts. It is a prime political topic for contemporary Serbia, and the politics of memory, or, more precisely, the monopoly over memory, is one of the key components in Serbia’s internal and foreign policies.KeywordsTextbook AuthorHistory TextbookCentral CelebrationSixtieth AnniversaryCommunist AuthorityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Memory as a battlefield: letters by traumatized German veterans and contested memories of the Great War

Статья посвящена общественно значимой роли памяти о Великой Отечественной войне и Победе в ней для многонационального культурного сообщества Северного Кавказа. Ее целью является рассмотреть состояние и эволюцию культурного пространства Северного Кавказа, в котором сложилось достаточно емкое отражение памяти о Великой Отечественной войне. В качестве культурного нарратива память о войне расценивается как инструмент преодоления постсоветских проблем региона и консолидации северокавказских народов на основе привлечения исторической науки, достижений художественной культуры, новейших технических средств коммуникации и гражданских инициатив. При опоре на концепцию исторической памяти, использовании хронологического и историко-сравнительного методов рассматриваются общие и специфические региональные практики, опыт развития методов и форм закрепления памяти о Великой Отечественной войне средствами монументального искусства в общественном сознании. Привлечены источники, свидетельствующие о неразрывности связи памяти поколений на примерах возведения в регионе общих мемориальных комплексов, посвященных участникам Великой Отечественной войны, воинам-интернационалистам и защитникам родной земли от международного терроризма. Историко-культурный ландшафт Северного Кавказа формируется также из материалов, связанных с деятельностью региональных архивов, музеев и библиотек. Благодаря их усилиям получили распространение новейшие методы информационного обеспечения персональных и массовых форм запросов о событиях и участниках Великой Отечественной войны. Новые решения в ходе увековечения памяти о войне в культурном пространстве региона коррелируются с социально-правовыми новациями федерального значения, в результате которых в настоящее время существует движение «Бессмертный полк», создан Национальный центр исторической памяти и принят Федеральный закон «Об увековечении памяти жертв геноцида советского народа в период Великой Отечественной войны 1941-1945 годов». The article is devoted to the socially significant role of the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Victory in it for the multinational cultural community of the North Caucasus. Its purpose is to consider the state and evolution of the cultural space of the North Caucasus, which has developed a fairly capacious reflection of the memory of the Great Patriotic War. As a cultural narrative, the memory of the war is regarded as a tool for overcoming the post-Soviet problems of the region and consolidating the North Caucasian peoples based on the involvement of historical science, achievements of artistic culture, the latest technical means of communication and civil initiatives. General and specific regional practices, the experience of developing methods and forms of consolidating the memory of the Great Patriotic War by means of monumental art in the public consciousness are considered based on the concept of historical memory, chronological and historical-comparative methods. Documentary sources are involved that testify to the inseparability of the memory of generations using examples of the construction of common memorial complexes in the region dedicated to participants in the Great Patriotic War, internationalist soldiers and defenders of their native land from international terrorism. The historical and cultural landscape of the North Caucasus is also formed from materials related to the activities of regional archives, museums and libraries. Thanks to the efforts of cultural figures, the latest methods of information support for personal and mass forms of requests about the events and participants of the Great Patriotic War have become widespread. New decisions in the course of perpetuating the memory of the war in the cultural space of the region correlate with social and legal innovations of federal significance, as a result of which the Immortal Regiment movement currently exists, the National Center for Historical Memory was created and the Federal Law "On the Perpetuation of the Memory of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945" was adopted.

The veteran movement in the Habsburg monarchy, which was, in the last third of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the most important pillar of the political system, faced serious difficulties after the 1918 Revolution in Austria. Until the collapse of the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Socials in 1920, there were insurmountable obstacles to the revival of the “old Austrian” military traditions. Officers’ and veterans’ organizations were firmly associated in the eyes of leftist political forces with the legacy of the “old regime”. The gradual “rehabilitation” of the “old Austrian” military traditions was closely connected with the tenure of the Minister of War of Austria Carl Vaugoin, who sought to get rid of the influence of the Social Democrats on the armed forces. As a result, in 1921and 1922 the formation of new veteran organisations began, developing their activities against the background of competition between Social-Democratic, Christian-Social and pan-German narratives about the First World War in the public consciousness of the First Republic. Considering the typology of veteran associations, one should single out organisations that united veterans at the national (local) level, regardless of their place of service during the war, and veterans’ unions based on specific military units of Austria-Hungary. The latter, as contemporary research proves, played a leading role in the formation of the historical memory of the war. The main means of group self-identification was the feeling of “front-line comradeship”cultivated in the veteran unions, which was the highest value orientation of the former front-line soldiers who shared right-wing political views. The veteran supporters of Social Democrats resisted the constant appeal of the right to the “front-line comradeship”, allegedly smoothing out social contradictions within the army collective during the war. In veteran organisations, both “pure” and “mixed” forms of memory of the First World War were “confessed”. The latter were typical of the veterans of those regions of Austria that were affected by the territorial reorganisation in accordance with the Saint-Germain Peace Treaty of 1919.

The article deals with the problems of reflecting memorial wars in Internet memes. The authors consider memorial wars to be a special type of information wars related to memory policy. The politics of memory causes a struggle of interpretations of various versions of the Past within the framework of discursive practices of myth-making and leads to memorial wars. Political actors introduce ideas about the Past into the mass consciousness. Images of the Past are not always clearly perceived by society, which leads to conflicts. These conflicts have a media nature and take place in the virtual space. Internet users involve memes to express their political or ideological positions and to reflect their experiences of the Past. The authors consider historical memes an effective form of participation of Internet users in the formation of political culture and historical memory. Historical Internet memes change the tone of information messages, the assessment of historical facts and their emotional color for the purposes of historical policy. Using the example of the memory of the Second World War, the authors show Internet memes as a tool of historical policy and a «weapon» of memorial wars. Political actors use the history of war as a symbolic resource. Various interpretations and falsifications of the historical events of Second World Warcome into conflict with each other. Images of Stalin and Hitler in memes represent the memory of the war. Internet memes clearly demonstrate the transformation of ideas about the Soviet leader and the Nazi leader in the media space. The case on historical memory of the Second World Warshows the possibilities of using memes in memory wars.

In Portugal, the development of a memorial project commemorating the First World War, from the treatment of physical bodies to their more or less symbolic (or more or less doctrinal) representations, did not achieve its intended results, in the sense that it did not succeed in consecrating Portugal as a participant of recognized standing and a victorious Allied nation. The memory of the war was clearly shaped by a dimension of tragedy and not by victory. This article will provide, via the dialectics between official and public memory, an in-depth analysis of the politics of memory as it manifests in official commemorative projects. It will examine the forms, pace of implantation and rituals carried out to renew the meaning of memory, as well as the underlying play of forces it is subject to, along with the way in which it establishes cultural and even political rupture or continuity. Through the observation of elements that constitute a war culture – images, language and practices – which emerged during and after the conflict, this study seeks to clarify the First Republic’s successes and failures in delineating and consolidating an official memory of the First World War in Portugal.

How the First World War has come to be remembered has, over the past two decades, become a major concern for British historians, eclipsing earlier scholarly preoccupations with war guilt and its political consequences, the impact of the war on social structure and the status of women, and the conflict's role in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. This article surveys both scholarship on the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain and the debates about how the memory of this war – the ‘Great War’ – has either retarded its consideration ‘as history’ or spurred new, if not always entirely successful, modes of inquiry into the relationships among war, society, and culture. The article argues that memory of the Great War must itself be treated as history; that the meaning of that memory should be placed within the context of the changing events, ideas, and identities of the entire twentieth century; and that more scholarly attention needs to be directed at the popular reception of representations of the Great War by the population at large, and at the power of the various forms of media by which those representations have been conveyed to their audience and have thereby shaped memory of the conflict.

This chapter outlines the German memory of the First World War. It discusses collective memory, political culture and historical scholarship in the period 1918 to 1939, the Second World War, and since 1945. The memory of the war was increasingly a battleground in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The obsessive campaign waged against the ‘war guilt lie’ and reparations payments stood for nationalist Germany’s refusal to accept the consequences of defeat. Hitler and the German army learned the lessons of offensive warfare from the First World War and succeeded in combined, all-arms, mechanized, motorized operations (Poland, the West 1940, Barbarossa) which overcame the stagnation of trench warfare: ‘lightning warfare’ spearheaded by tanks and aircraft to ensure mobility. The memory of 1914 strongly influenced German warfare at the start of the Second World War. Keywords: First World War; German memory; lightning warfare; Weimar Republic

W artykule postawiono pytanie o miejsce I wojny światowej we współczesnej polskiej kulturze i polityce pamięci. Analiza jubileuszowych obchodów w 100-lecie rozpoczęcia i zakończenia Wielkiej Wojny wskazuje na zasadniczy brak odniesień do związanych z nią wydarzeń w polskiej oficjalnej polityce pamięci. Dostrzeżenie tej sfery „niepamięci” skłania do postawienia pytań o jej skalę, spójność oraz przyczyny. W celu określenia ram społecznej niepamięci o Wielkiej Wojnie w artykule podjęto próbę odnalezienia i zarysowania miejsc w przestrzeni pamięci, w których pojawiają się odwołania do osób, miejsc i wydarzeń z nią związanych. Problem ten został rozpatrzony w trzech rejestrach działania pamięci zbiorowej, określonych tu jako: wymiar oficjalnej, państwowej polityki pamięci, wymiar pamięci lokalnej oraz wymiar pamięci na poziomie indywidualnym. Zebrany materiał badawczy wskazuje, że pomimo znaczącego wpływu I wojny światowej na życie całego wojennego pokolenia oraz pomimo skali i dotkliwości działań wojennych mających miejsce na terytorium dzisiejszej Polski doświadczenia z lat 1914–1918 zostały przez Polaków zapomniane. Wielka Wojna w oficjalnej narracji państwowej jest przeważnie przemilczana bądź traktuje się ją jedynie jako swego rodzaju „preludium” do odrodzenia się polskiej państwowości. W jeszcze większym stopniu jest ona nieobecna w świadomości współczesnych Polaków, którym zazwyczaj brakuje podstawowej wiedzy faktograficznej. Nie mają także skojarzeń kulturowych związanych z I wojną światową. Popularna symbolika Józefa Piłsudskiego i 11 listopada 1918 roku funkcjonuje w oderwaniu od kontekstu historycznego i nie jest przedmiotem debaty publicznej. W ostatnich latach w wymiarze lokalnym mamy jednak do czynienia z pewnym renesansem pamięci o I wojnie światowej oraz jej uczestnikach i ofiarach, niezależnie od tego, jakim posługiwali się językiem i pod jakim występowali sztandarem. Artykuł kończy przedstawienie trzech hipotez na temat społecznych i politycznych przyczyn, które sprawiły, że pamięć o doświadczeniach wojennych Polaków nie weszła do kanonu kultury narodowej.

“The Crowning Insult”: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke Rebecca Jo Plant is an associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. Frances M. Clarke is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. The authors would like to thank Clare Corbould, Carolyn Eastman, Ivan Hess, Andy Kaladelfos, Rachel Klein, Paul A. Kramer, Micki McElya, Alisa Plant, Elizabeth Strodeur Pryor, Stephen Robertson, Ken Vandevelde, and Judith Weisenfeld. They also benefited greatly from the comments of Hasan Jeffries, Edward T. Linenthal, Lisa Materson, G. Kurt Piehler, and the anonymous reviewers for the Jour- nal of American History. Readers may contact Plant at rplant@ucsd.edu; and Clarke at frances.clarke@sydney.edu.au. On the history of the gold star mother and widow pilgrimages, see John W. Graham, The Gold Star Mother Pil- grimages of the 1930s: Overseas Grave Visitations by Mothers and Widows of Fallen U.S. World War I Soldiers (Jefferson, 2005); Lisa M. Budreau, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933 (New York, 2009), 185–241; G. Kurt Piehler, “The War Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, 1994), 168–85; Lotte Larsen Meyer, “Mourning in a Distant Land: Gold Star Pilgrimages to American Military Cemeteries in Eu- rope, 1930–33,” Markers, 20 (2003), 31–75; and Rebecca Jo Plant, “The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages: Patriotic Maternalists and Their Critics in Interwar America,” in Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marian van der Klein et al. (Oxford, 2012), 121–47. For studies that focus on the African American pilgrims but that do not detail how the controversy surrounding the pilgrimages played out in doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav351 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. The Journal of American History September 2015 Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 26, 2015 James Weldon Johnson was hard at work on his book Black Manhattan in the summer of 1930, having taken leave from his position as executive secretary of the National As- sociation for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp). One morning, after reading a newspaper article that filled him with disgust, he “threw aside” his manuscript to write a satirical poem. The offending news concerned the gold star mother and widow pilgrimages, a federal government program that would send nearly 6,700 women to Europe to visit the graves of their sons and husbands who had perished in World War I. Johnson read that “Negro gold-star mothers would not be allowed to sail on the same ship with the white gold-star mothers” but would instead travel separately on “a second- class vessel.” The poem he penned in protest of that treatment, “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” never directly refers to the women, however; instead, it dramatizes the plight of the betrayed and effaced black male soldier. In the poem’s fantastical climax, set in the nation’s capital at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, mem- bers of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and veterans’ groups recoil in horror when the soldier is revealed to be black: “Through it, at last, his towering form loomed / big and bigger— / ‘Great God Almighty! Look!’ they cried / ‘he is a nigger!’” 1 Today largely forgotten, the government’s discriminatory treatment of the black gold star mothers and wives ranked high among the concerns that preoccupied black journal-