Memory abuse, violence and the dissolution of Yugoslavia: a theoretical framework for understanding memory in conflict

Abstract

This paper explores the term “memory abuse” as an analytical framework to understanding politically constructed mnemonic tensions in the years preceding Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Here, “memory abuse” represents an intersection between the literatures of memory and conflict studies and refers to the intentional manipulation of memory beyond an intangible threshold, past which violence inevitably results. Drawing on the typologies of collective and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I argue that the political mobilisation of both distant and recent memories in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s to a significant degree contributed to the outbreak of war in the early 1990s, and contemporary political actors have perpetuated an abuse of memory that has limited reconciliatory outcomes in the region since the end of conflict. In reformulating the memories of, inter alia, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the atrocities of the Second World War to fit nationalist narratives, political actors across Yugoslavia's republics sought to profit from forced divisions that ultimately brought about the country's end.

Keywords:

• Yugoslavia
• Serbia
• Croatia
• memory
• conflict
• violence
• nationalism
• war

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ross Bond, Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Gëzim Krasniqi, George Wilkes and Gerhard Anders of the University of Edinburgh for the feedback and guidance they provided on the materials that ultimately were included in this article. As well, I am grateful for the support of Saša Božić, Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Siniša Malešević, Daphne Winland and the countless other scholars at the “Divided Societies XX: Memory Wars” summer school in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in May 2017 who lent their expertise and enthusiasm for the study of memory in conflict and encouraged me to write this piece.

Notes

1 It is important to note the somewhat conflated use of the German terms Assmann and Assmann employ in their descriptions of collective memory. While Erinnerung often refers to a singular memory, the reflexive verb (sich) erinnern highlights the storage or retrieval of a memory from the individual conscience. Gedächtnis more generally refers to conscience, as defined above; this contrasts to Bewusstsein, consciousness (literally “being conscious”), which often is not found in this literature. The authors often use Erinnerung and Gedächtnis interchangeably, but I contend that this is an intentional distinction between an individual memory best managed within a particular conscience, or set of memories actively managed by the collective, such as “a collective memory of” the Holocaust, part of the larger German (or European) “collective conscience” or the “collective memory” more generally. Snyder (2009) correlates the French mémoire with Gedächtnis and souvenir with Erinnerung.

2 The Assmanns’ work, though cited in many texts on memory and mnemonic practices, also is relatively underrepresented in English-language literature; Gensburger (2016) has conducted a study of author citations in memory studies and notes 2050 citations of Jeffrey Olick and 1370 of F. C. Bartlett in comparison to 870 citations for “Assmann”, presumably including both Jan and Aleida Assmann, whose work spans over three decades. Aleida Assmann herself states that the recent translation into English of Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft: Grundbegriffe, Themen, Fragestellungen (2006) serves to “[provide] an introduction to concepts, questions and theories derived from the German Kulturwissenschaften, as well as from the very different British and American approaches to the subject” to a wider audience, “not only to students of English [Assmann uses examples from classic English literature to describe her theories of memory, culture and identity] but also to an Anglophone readership” (2012, 5).

3 My own translation from the German original.

4 My own translation from the German original.