Intervention, Return, and Reinterpretation: The Jasenovac Memorial Museum Collection, 1991–2006

Abstract

This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.

Appropriating Memory in the Name of the State

“…But our analyses have again foregrounded the issue on Serbian vs. Nazi suffering without analyzing what happened to Jews specifically as a result of Nedić’s decision to collaborate. Numerous articles have analyzed the reinterpretation of the Jasenovac narrative, which Serbia uses to place itself as ultimate victim and Jews simply one other group that suffered during the Nazi occupation (victims of concentration camps as typically described as “Serbs, Jews and Roma”), and Croatia has used it to absolve itself of responsibility by reinterpreting it as “victims of fascism” instead of “victims of Croatia” (Pavlaković 2019; Zaremba 2022). Yet no research has focused on the memory of the Staro Sajmište concentration camp, where the primary victims were Jews (Bajford 2009).…”