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Thematization, historical culture and genocide

Remake, a Bosnian/French film from 2002, relates the life of Tarik, a young writer from Sarajevo in the first half of the 1990s.¹ As the Bosnian conflict unfolds, he and his friends find themselves on different sides of a war they cannot support. Together with other Muslim men, Tarik is imprisoned and tortured in a camp held by Serbian nationalist forces during the siege of Sarajevo. Remake shows the brutal maltreatment of prisoners in the camp and the Serbian guards parading nationalist symbols associated with the Second World War Serbian Chetnik forces, who had committed numerous war crimes in Bosnia.

Tarik has recently finished a film manuscript about his father, who survived imprisonment and torture by the Croatian Fascist Ustasha movement that held power in Croatia and Bosnia during the Second World War. Tarik’s father was sent to the infamous Ustasha concentration camp, Jasenovac, and Remake pictures him standing in a queue of naked prisoners on their way to be executed. Ustasha guards, swinging heavy wooden mallets, crush the skulls of the prisoners and throw the bodies in the river Sava. Fortunately, Tarik’s father is saved by chance and returns to Sarajevo.

Remake shifts between the two wars and the parallel stories of individual suffering within frameworks of ethnic conflict and massacres. As the title suggests, the two stories could be seen as essentially the same. The story about Tarik’s father is filled with easily recognisable references to elements of Yugoslav historiography of the Second World War and its massacres, for example the heavy wooden mallets used by the killers at Jasenovac. The fact that the part of the film depicting the father’s experiences turns out to be an enactment of the son’s manuscript underlines Remake’s own re-enactment of history, reflecting chains of presentations and representations of the past.

The example of Remake illustrates several points: it demonstrates some of the ways in which history is drawn upon and referred to outside the academic and educational subject. It also shows how a historical culture, in this case that of Yugoslavia, holds an archive of historical stock-references that are connected to certain understandings of the past. Moreover, it shows how these references can be re-contextualised in order to suggest other meanings. While Remake’s references to the Second World War draws on the communist historiography of ‘the people against the fascists’, these references can be seen to imply an earlier instance of repetitive interethnic violence in Bosnia as well. Thus, Remake also illustrates a particular way of representing recent history in the former Yugoslav areas during and after the wars of the 1990s: the idea that these wars were somehow a resumption of the internal Yugoslav fighting of the Second World War, and that interethnic conflicts and violence were thus repeating themselves.

Remake is but one example of a wider cultural interest, which had continued for several decades, in the massacres and war crimes of the Second World War. The history of the inter-Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War was a prominent theme within historiography and popular history in Yugoslavia from the mid 1980s.

The question of how to write the history of these massacres was rather delicate throughout most of the existence of Socialist Yugoslavia. In a multiethnic state, such as Yugoslavia, ethnic violence and massacres are complex and sensitive questions. Soon after the end of the Second World War, the history of these massacres was subordinated to a state-bearing myth of united patriotic Yugoslav resistance and revolutionary struggle, and the history of internal Yugoslav violence was made to fit into that narrative. The myth of united resistance remained officially unchallenged until the 1980s, when history was revised, not least from national perspectives, and the history of Yugoslav war crimes was ascribed a new, much more national meaning.

While Second World War history did not become less embedded in politics with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and with the wars and the establishment of nation states, the relationship between history and politics certainly became more varied and many-sided. In the 1990s and the early 21^st century, wartime massacres were crucial elements of the new national histories being written in the post-Yugoslav republics. Thus, the inter-Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War constitute a central problem of what we may call the ‘historical culture’, that is, historiography and popular representations of history in Yugoslavia from the establishment of the socialist federation from 1945 to 2002, when it was finally decided to abandon Yugoslavia as a federal state.

This book investigates how the inter-Yugoslav massacres committed during the Second World War have been represented and explained in Yugoslavia in the period from 1945 to 2002, and how these representations interact with political and cultural developments. By analysing representations of massacres and the ways in which they changed, the book shows how the events of the Second World War, through a process of thematisation, were emphasised and integrated within the ‘theme of genocide’. The aim is to demonstrate how the history of the massacres was used in different ways for different purposes, and point out some of the consequences of these various uses.

The ways in which Yugoslav society and its historians attempted to come to terms with – and use – the painful and problematic history of the inter- Yugoslav Second World War massacres illuminate some of the problems and processes at stake when societies are to grasp the many terrible histories of the twentieth century. What are the roles of history and historians in post-conflict societies? How do we represent the past in a way that enables us to contain the “terror of history”, as Dirk Moses has phrased it, or, to paraphrase Charles Maier’s study of Germany’s struggles over Second World War historiography, how do we cope with our “unmasterable pasts”?²

The investigation in this book draws on a handful of concepts that illuminate different aspects of the problem. They are the concepts of thematization, historical culture and use of history, all introduced below. Particular emphasis is laid on the relationships between historical culture and society. Furthermore, parallels are identified between Yugoslav genocide historiography and tendencies within wider international developments of genocide studies.