Croatia – Exhibiting Memory and History at the "Shores of Europe"

Abstract

Even though the self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criteria for joining the European union, 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 generatedinformal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust during the process called “Europeanization of the Holocaust”. This is indicated by the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest opened almost empty only weeks before Hungary joined the European Union although the permanent exhibition had not been ready yet. The Croatian case, especially the new exhibition that opened at the KZ-memorial Jasenovac in 2006, will serve in order to examine how the “Europeanization of the Holocaust” impacts on a candidate state. The memorial museum resembles Holocaust Memorial Museums in Washington, Budapest etc., but, although it is in situ, at the site of the former KZ, the focus clearly lies on individual victim stories and their belongings, while the perpetrators and the daily “routine” at the KZ are hardly mentioned. Another problem influenced by the international trend to focus on (Jewish) individuals and moral lessons rather than on the historical circumstances is that the focus on the Shoa blanks the fact that Serbs had been the foremost largest victim group. The third field, where the influence of “European standards” on the Croatian politics of the past will be examined, is the equalization of “red and black totalitarianism” at the annual commemorations in Jasenovac. While this was already done during the revisions era of President Franjo Tudman during the 1990, today it perfectly matches EU-politics, as the introduction of the 23rd of August, the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin-pact, as a Memorial day for both victims of Nazism and Stalinism shows

Media memorial discourses and memory struggles in Slovenia: Transforming memories of the Second World War and Yugoslavia

“…Ljiljana Radonic (2011: 360) and Kirn (2014b: 313, 328–329) observe similar trends in all post-Yugoslav countries and talk about these phenomena as a Europeanisation of memory, as the influence of European standards on the national politics of the past. The opportunity to commemorate the collaboration and to represent collaborators as true nationalists who collaborated with the occupying foreign forces only to resist communism was oddly derived from the EU’s reinterpretation of totalitarianism.…”

“…However, such a struggle for the meaning and memory of WWII is a wider post-Yugoslav phenomenon. A number of similar cases exist in ex-Yugoslavia, which testify to the same problem: revisionist plans in Croatia to build a national memorial for the Ustaša and soldiers of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) killed by Partisans (Radonic, 2011), unsettled historical revisions in Serbia and Croatia regarding high levels of sympathy for Chetniks (the case of General Mihailović) and the Ustaša (General Pavelić) as antifascists (Mihajlović Trbovc and Pavasović Trošt, 2013), the ways in which Draža Mihailović and the Chetnik movement have been rehabilitated as Serbian national heroes (Sindbaek, 2009). Competing narratives with the criminalisation of the Partisan movement on one side and the celebration of collaboration as anti-communist national patriots on the other proves that memory is at the heart of issues about national self-determination.…”

Croatia's Politics of the Past during the Tuđman Era (1990–1999)—Old Wine in New Bottles?

“…The best example of this is the controversial new exhibition that opened at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in 2006 and that explicitly referred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Anne-Frank-House as its role models. 135 Tuđman's historical revisionism and "Croat democracy" of the 1990s, which were undoubtedly successful in consolidating a Croat national community, had proven to be a heavy burden for the consolidation of democracy and the fight against radical nationalism. Of course, Croatia of the 1990s was not the only former Yugoslav successor-state that still had not faced its "negative heritage" in an appropriate way; in Serbia and the Serbian part of Bosnia, Holocaust meant only the historical events in the Ustaša-State.…”

Debating the reconciliatory use of heritage. European post-monumentalism versus regional national-monumentalism

“…With regard to the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, this normative notion of a 'European shared past' is significant. The fact that conflicts had broken out in this part of Europe gave new impetus to a so-called 'Europeanisation of the Holocaust' as history and moral guidepost (Banke 2009, 6;Radonić 2011). In order to maintain the cult of memory to 'never again' have war on European territory, European actors such as the EU and the CoE insisted that the region had to re-inscribe itself into the narrative of reconciliation and regional cooperation.…”