engleski

Damnatio memoriae: Memory and Identity of the (Post)Communist Croatia

In its post-war positioning in relation to the Western-European realm and the Soviet Union since the famous split in 1948, Yugoslavia showed the tendency to forming a unique, but rather hybrid federative identity. Expectedly, cultural politics were used as its instrument in order to separate from the Soviet prototype model and adapt to the process of Western recovery, which was manifested in the milleu of Yugoslavian ethics and aesthetics. In line with the abstract tendencies of the West in visual expression, Yugoslavia has appropriated this mode later to be applied to the public memorial sculpture, i.e. its monuments. Those monuments represent a unique phenomenon that requires consideration within the context of the so called “socialist modernism”. In that respect, one of the postulates of this research is that the aesthetic category is indeed one of the crucial elements in constituting the recognizable Yugoslav identity. Within that framework, we will analyze the notion of 'trauma' as: 1) the place of a previous trauma which is positively commemorated by a certain monumental corpus ; 2) subsequently inscribed trauma into that same memorial place amidst the shifts of political systems. With the radical shifts of the political structures in the 1990s, the decadence of the federative regime, as much as the significant number of social norms and convention, comes systematic elimination and devastation of the abstract communist monuments which are now seen as the material reminders of the oppression. Destruction thus becomes a ritualistic cleansing with the objective of legitimizing the new liberated national entity. Therefore, the replacing of the places of remembrance with the places of forgetting, removed the tactile and visual symbols of what was seen as the interruption of continuity of a nation and a nationalism.

memory; identity; monuments; socialist modernism; nationalism; Yugoslavia; Croatia

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