Political memory after state death: the abandoned Yugoslav national pavilion at Auschwitz

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between political memory, state ontological security, and populist movements after state death. When a state dies, ideological space opens up for new state agents to narrate a different version of the past, one that delegitimizes the ideological underpinning of the old state order and creates ontological insecurity in the new polity. Populism becomes an especially attractive ideology, as it feeds on a sense of insecurity at home and abroad. The argument is illustrated with the case study of transformed Holocaust remembrance after the death of Yugoslavia. Tracing the history of the Yugoslav memorial exhibition at Auschwitz, the article demonstrates ways in which post-Yugoslav Holocaust remembrance has focused on delegitimizing Yugoslavia’s communist past, especially its antifascism. Once antifascism is removed from state political memory, political space opens up for a revival and ideological normalization of populist—and at its most extreme—fascist ideological movements in the present.

Acknowledgements

This article benefited greatly from feedback I received at the International Studies Association Annual Conference in Baltimore in February 2017, the conference ‘Museums and Their Publics at Sites of Conflicted History’ held at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in March 2017 and the symposium ‘Populism and Insecurity in International Relations’ held at the University of Utah in April 2018. I am especially grateful to Catarina Kinnvall, Maria Mälksoo and Ayşe Zarakol for detailed comments on earlier drafts of the paper, and especially Brent Steele for convening and editing this special issue. I am also very thankful to the staff of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, and the Museum of Yugoslavia and the Institute for Recent History of Serbia, both in Belgrade.

Notes

1 The Independent State of Croatia is often referred to in the literature as NDH—Nezavisna država Hrvatska.

2 While all former Yugoslav states—with the exception of Montenegro—had Jewish minorities eradicated in the Holocaust, due to space constraints I discuss Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, the three countries from where Jews were directly transported to Auschwitz—the core interest of this study. Jews from Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia were mostly killed elsewhere (in Treblinka, or in homegrown Croatian camps).

3 For a much more extensive presentation of this argument, see Subotic (2018).

4 Jasenovac was the largest concentration and death camp on the territory of Yugoslavia during World War II. It was run by the NDH, and is the site where 85,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, communists and other ‘enemies of the state’ were murdered.

5 While commemorations are held in the town of Bleiburg in today’s Austria (where British forces in May 1945 refused to receive surrendering Croat troops and turned them over to Yugoslav partisans), the actual location of the ‘Bleiburg’ massacre is elsewhere, at a number of sites scattered across the Croatian, Slovenian and Austrian border. While the number of victims has been hotly disputed over the years, many Croatian nationalists inflating the number killed to as many as half a million, most scholarly consensus puts the number of killed somewhere near 70,000 (Kolstø 2010).

6 Interview with Kaja Širok, National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia and member of the ex-Yugoslav Auschwitz steering committee, 24 June 2016, Ljubljana.

7 The Macedonian museum opened in 2011. The governments of Serbia and Croatia have also proposed Holocaust museums, but these plans have not moved much from the proposal stage.

8 Interview with Olga Manojlović Pintar, Institute for Recent History of Serbia and member of the ex-Yugoslav Auschwitz steering committee, 11 July 2016, Belgrade.

9 Pintar, interview. Also, interview with Nataša Mataušić, Croatian History Museum, member of the ex-Yugoslav Auschwitz steering committee, 24 October 2017, Zagreb.

10 Interview with Teresa Wontor-Cichy, Auschwitz Memorial Museum Research Centre, 12 March 2017, Auschwitz.

11 The Nedić rehabilitation, ultimately, was denied in July 2018 by the Serbian High Court (subject to appeal) (Belgrade High Court 2018).

12 The plaque was consequently moved a few miles down the road to the town of Novska (Milekic 2017).