Slovak and Croatian invocation of Europe: the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum

Abstract

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criterion for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust in the context of “Europeanization of Memory.” Comparative analysis shows that post-Communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform in the context of those informal standards. Both the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia and the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica were founded in the Communist era and played an important role in supporting the founding myths of the two countries. Both were subjected to historical revisionism during the 1990s. In the current exhibitions from 2004/2006, both memorial museums stress being part of Europe and refer, to “international standards” of musealization, while the Jasenovac memorial claims to focus on “the individual victim.” But stressing the European dimension of resistance and the Holocaust obscures such key aspects as the civil war and the responsibility of the respective collaborating regime.

Keywords:

• post-Communist memorial museums
• Slovak national uprising
• Jasenovac
• Europeanization of memory

Notes

1. In Slovakia Vladimír Mečiar was the first free elected prime minister, but until the end of his administration in 1998, his authoritarian style and the actions of the newly founded Slovak institutions maneuvered the country into international isolation and put NATO and EU membership in the distant future (Haughton 2003). In Croatia, Franjo Tuđman was the first free elected president, but he severely limited checks and balances and freedom of the press. This and his aggressive policy of supporting the autonomy of the Croatian part of Bosnia–Herzegovina left Croatia even more isolated when he died in 1999 (Radonic 2010, 135–152).

2. Many thanks to Tomas Sniegon for allocating the unpublished English translation of his dissertation published in Swedish (2008).

3. During the liberalization period in the 1960s, the two halves stood for the division of the Slovak society, during “normalization” in the 1970s for the break between capitalism and socialism. Today they are again seen as a symbol for the two differing Slovak narratives.

4. Against all expertise from the theory of anti-Semitism, the authors of the exhibition try to fight the idea of destructive Jews by pointing out that this Ustaša and Nazi propaganda is disproved by the fact that architects and builders of Jewish origin have constructed many important buildings in Zagreb during the first four decades of the twentieth century. As the snake full of stars of David indicates, however, anti-Semitism is not about criticizing Jewish unproductiveness, but imagining them as the “Gegenvolk” that will destroy us, if we do not destroy them first.

5. Prime Minister Sanader developed a new narrative in which he implicitly depicted Croatia as the “new Jew” and “the Serbs” as the new Nazis in the Yugoslav war. During a visit to Yad Vashem in 2005, he argued that, during the war of the 1990s, the Croats were victims of the “same kind of evil as Nazism and Fascism,” and that no one knew better than the Croats what it meant to be a victim of aggression and crime (Vjesnik, 29 June 2005; Radonic 2010, 335).