Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context1

For Tati2

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and
things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their
service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to
present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed
language.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Introduction: Postsocialist Effects

After the so-called democratic revolutions at the end of the 1980s in the East, the post-
socialist era has begun. Due to the transition period and absence of a better concept,
postsocialism has become a dominant signifier, which aims to cover all historical processes
that were at work in these societies. However, the post-socialist condition firmly developed
and promoted the advance of neoliberal ideology: the praise of the sacred mechanisms of the
free market, the withering away of the welfare state and the embracing of a Europe that will
take care of everything3. Everything, it might be said, except the war in its own back yard?
The transitional neoliberal ideology, which targeted the socialist state’s economic
management and relations, went hand in hand with its rightwing counterpart. The dissident
plea for human rights, launched in the name of parliamentarism and the “democratic” public
sphere, was invoked against the gloomy totalitarian past. And the critique of the totalitarian
past became a sine qua non of every democratic enunciation. If one wanted to belong to a
democratic camp, one had to purify oneself of the communist past. No matter how
undemocratic some of the new political practices were (the destruction of the welfare state,
nationalist outbursts, exclusion of minorities etc.), and no matter what the dissidents were
actually doing4, what counted was their initial ideological presupposition: anticommunism at
any price. But this ideological conjuncture was not only imposed from outside, it was not a
mere copy of the neoliberal struggle taking place in the West, but was formed and framed in
1
This article is a revised and extended version of the article “Remembering or thinking the partisan
movement?”. It was published in the catalogue The museum on the street (2009).
2
Tati, my grandfather Vlado Kirn, joined the Partisans in 1941 at the age of 15. Heavily wounded at the
age of 17, he was interned in Dachau, a concentration camp, where he remained a forced labourer until the end
of the war. I learned of his stories, Partisans and the occupation from my grandmother only after his death.
3
We should not overlook the fact that in Yugoslavia, neoliberal agenda started due to the implementation
of IMF conditions already in the beginning of the 1980s. On the analysis of detrimental effects of IMF on
Yugoslavia, see Cathérine Samary (1988), Branka Magaš (1993) and Susane Woodward (1995).
4
Tomaž Mastnak lucidly described how the civil society became ‘totalitarianism from below’ (1987).
the context of local ideologies, which produced something new and tested different more or
less unsuccessful models. Post-socialist ideologies became constitutive of the mainstream
democratic forces, which prepared the terrain for the “democratic” transition. The democratic
camp had one common enemy: the communist beast from the East. The latter helped to unite
all the ‘democratic’ forces in their anticommunist march towards the bright West European
future5.

Apart from the quest for European integration we have to thank dissidents to succeed
in revising the history. The post-Yugoslav nation-building processes demanded a new
interpretation of history; a whole nationalist ideological project was under way. The
‘thousand-year-old dream’ of one nation in one state came true and new national myths had to
be invented or transferred from the ancient context. Not only liberalism, but also nationalism
provided the major constitutive social ties promoted by the political classes and later
embraced by the masses6. Once in power, dissidents started demanding moral and legal
responsibility for crimes committed by the totalitarian regimes7. We argue that the post-
socialist condition cannot be explained without taking into account the hegemonic ideological
doublet of national-liberalism, a sort of neoliberal conservativism, which dominated the new
Europe. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, when socialism has come to an end
(Buden, 2009), the post-socialist effects are visible in the old Europe itself. Thus, it is not true
that only the West affected East, that is, that ex-socialist states had to adopt the western
recipes for successful transition; but also the East has succeeded in many ways in reframing
the historical discussions8 and in inventing their own policies of exclusion. The ultimate post-
socialist effect was recently inaugurated in the Resolution on European conscience and
totalitarianism. The Resolution was adopted in 2009 and the European Parliament proclaimed

5
For a detailed and lucid critical analysis of dissident discourse see Rastko Močnik (2003) and Boris
Buden (2001).
6
If the countries of the former socialist bloc found their ‘natural’ enemy in the Soviet Union and simply
equalized Soviet imperialism with communism, the Yugoslav situation was much more complex. The most
developed parts of the federation, Slovenia and Croatia, launched the critique of centralism, whereas other parts
like Serbia launched their nationalist campaign at the expense of the autonomy of the regions of Vojvodina and
Kosovo. Nationalism started becoming a primary ideological site only in the mid-1980s. The research into how it
was linked to the political and economical field is a very important question that still has to be answered. We
have to add that nationalism was not only a project from above, since at the same time it was happening in
everyday life, among the masses.
7
The lustration was the clearest dissident politics, which comprised of cleansing all Party members from
official posts. In other words, lustration was a way to recompose the political class. We have to acknowledge the
differences in the scale and intensity of these processes within the socialist block. In same states, these
anticommunist policies were extremely fervent (Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic, …), whilst in other states,
the former communist parties democratized and participated in the reconciliation and transition processes.
8
The optimistic and romantic view of the past is commodified in the nostalgic narrative. Yugonostalgia
or Osstalgia should be seen in both ways as Western phantasm and as a product of Eastern countries.
23 August as a remembrance day for totalitarian crimes. This event was an important
landmark in a process of new European memorialisation. It is a clear example of historical
revisionism: in one swoop it equates communism with fascism, therefore forgetting that the
Second World War was won by a large alliance of antifascist groups within which communist
and partisan forces were its equal and essential part.

This essay focuses on the specificity of post-socialist ideology in the post-Yugoslav

context, where one of the most important signifiers of nationalist ideologies has become
national reconciliation. It has major consequences in legitimizing the ethnic divisions in ex-
Yugoslavia, its imagined past and future. The most exemplary case, which we will examine
closely, is the management of monuments, which is fashionably labelled the ‘politics of
memory’. The contemporary politics of memory results in the relativisation of historical facts;
the universalisation of the figure of the victim; the reconciliation of partisans and local
fascists, or in very concrete terms paying pensions to collaborators9. Post-socialist revisionism
– framed as the critique of totalitarianism on the one hand and national reconciliation on the
other – is thus the main ideological trajectory and vehicle, which in the last instance
rehabilitates fascism, glorifies parliamentary democracy and further disqualifies any
emancipatory politics.

We shall examine this question in three parts: in the first we shall analyze closely the
transformation in the landscape of monuments in the Croatian context using Žižić’s film
Damnatio Memoriae (2001). After analyzing the destruction of monuments in the post-
Yugoslavian context we juxtapose it with Yugoslav socialist state art and the post-
revolutionary politics of aesthetics. In the second part we shall reflect on the reconciliation
discourse in Slovenia, which uncovers specific revisionist aesthetization and memorialisation.
The new politics of memory will be read as crucial for the nation-alistic-building process in
the post-Yugoslav context. We shall try to answer the following question: what is the
difference between the Yugoslav politics of memory on the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle
(1941-1945) and the post-Yugoslav politics of memory? The concluding part presents a
discussion on the Partisan movement, which outlines the critique of the national reconciliation
ideology and a different interpretation of the war period that runs against the dominant
nationalist readings of history.

9
This happened in Serbia – the payment of pensions to specific group of Chetniks, but this phenomenon is
appearing also in Italy, where the same policy would be applied to some Fascists.
I. Post-Yugoslav Vs. Yugoslav Socialist Politics of Memory

a.) Damnatio Memoriae10: A Defence of the Aesthetic Effect à la Žižić

Bogdan Žižić made the documentary on the fate of antifascist monuments, which was
screened on Croatian public television in 2001. Apart from some minor comments, it did not
really succeed in enhancing public discussion on this important issue. The film’s voiceover
starts with the proposition that a monument is a “sign of the past and a witness to the future”.
Monuments must be shown respect. In contrast to this Damnatio Memoriae shows the
dynamics and the scope of the nationalistic policy of retaliations for the antifascist past. It
digs down into the recent beginnings of Croatian statehood. The Croatian war of
independence (1991-1995) fostered extremist nationalism and re-Catholicisation, which
materialized most genuinely in ‘grassroots’ politics, which destroyed or mutilated
monuments. These actions had at least one common denominator: their goal was to eliminate
historical traces of Yugoslavia and the antifascist struggle in Croatia. A new history was
being written.

In the early 1990s there were two prevalent methods in dealing with monuments. The
first solution was conversion of old monuments: they were simply given new content. The
monument would remain the same, except that the red stars would be replaced by Catholic
crosses, and the antifascist slogans of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle with the Croatian
checkerboard coat-of-arms and inscriptions dedicated to the Croatian nation. New memorials
were often inaugurated during the visits of
Franjo Tuñman11. The other method of getting
even with the past was direct ‘grassroots’ acts
of destruction. Unknown perpetrators would
simply blow up monuments or deface them and
write Ustasha slogans on them.

Figure 1

10
The phrase Damnatio memoriae describes a political practice in Ancient Rome. Traitors were excluded
from the Roman urbs and all historical traces of their existence were destroyed. In this way the honour of Rome
was preserved. The Senate or later an Emperor could use this practice to condemn their predecessors and seize
their property and remake or destroy the monuments of the condemned.
11
Franjo Tuñman was the president of Croatia in the years during and after the war in Croatia.
Some of the monuments were partially damaged, as in Dubrovnik (figure 1), but remained
present as a trace of the unfinished politics of destruction. This inscription is a real document
of time, a sign of the past and present. (Source: Damnatio Memoriae)

Figure 2
Some of the statues or sculptures were
destroyed and then transferred to
forests or fields, or left at the side of
the former memorial site, as this image
shows (Source: Damnatio Memoriae).

Virtually no antifascist
monument anywhere in Croatia was spared, apart from in Istria. It would be wrong to claim
that these actions were directed ‘from above’ as part of some political scheme or hidden
agenda of the political class. The documentary leads to the conclusion that the destruction and
the purge were systematic, some kind of ‘cleansing regime’. In other words, this cleansing
regime tried to eradicate the foreign element, the false, un-Croatian element, which related to
the constitution of the socialist Yugoslavia and the Partisan movement. The struggle for a new
Croatian identity, for the constitution of a Croatian nation state included a specific form of
ideological interpellation. Every member of the new state owed dual allegiance: to the Roman
Catholic Church and to the Croatian nation. This dual nature of Croatian-ness was mirrored
also in the changed image of the landscape itself; the changes of the names of monuments and
streets point to the impact of the conflict in the imaginary realm. The fact that the authorities
were not indifferent to such actions and their impact became plainly evident from the
decisions of the supposedly most independent state institutions, the courts. The film shows the
example of an artist who had put up the antifascist monument that was destroyed during the
1990s. The artist brought his case on the court, but the court ruled in favour of the perpetrators
and that was the end of the story. The politics of destruction was a realization of an extreme
nationalist project undertaken from above and below. The spontaneity of grassroots activities
was sometimes hidden, other times openly supported by the official politics.
 As important as Žižić’s film is in terms of its informative and historical value, since it
opens up a theme which is of vital importance in the post-Yugoslav context, the political
message it sends seems quite opportunistic, expressed in the quasi-neutral register of art for
art’s sake. In his analysis of the phenomenon, Žižić puts the destruction of monuments on
trial. His verdict consists of two propositions: the first and general thesis supports the point
that destruction is a morally intolerable act. Monuments must be respected, since they bear
witness to the future12. The second and more problematic thesis can be summed up thus: it is
true that many of the antifascist monuments were ideological (communist) and moreover had
no aesthetic value, but, despite the deluge of ideological monuments, a number of
internationally recognizable monuments were made. They were works of art. By resorting to
the argument of aesthetic value, Žižić may have reckoned that he had managed to sidestep the
ideology of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia or that the works of art had become
wholly autonomous and ideology-free. Aesthetically significant works – such as Vojin Bakić's
sculptures – should be viewed strictly from an artistic angle and without ideology. The fact of
their destruction testifies to the barbarism and ignorance of the perpetrators. Although Žižić
makes a general plea for the protection of all monuments, he obviously deems some among
them privileged. The second thesis is in contradiction with the first, while Žižić’s
argumentation includes some hidden propositions. One of them, quite perverse, is that other,
more ideological monuments do not deserve protection. Where the filmmaker was faced with
a crucial problem to rethink the connections between ideology, politics, and art, he simply
renounced it. The fact that some of the monuments were real works of art does not make them
any more worthy of protection. Exposing the vandalism and the barbarism of the perpetrators
requires that one passes a moral judgment without taking it a step further toward thinking and
naming this form of politics. By dispensing with political ideology, Žižić’s argumentation
leaves the way open for another kind of ideology: aesthetic ideology. Žižić intervenes in
reality through the aesthetic discourse which allows him to not get his hands dirty with
ideology, either communist or fascist. The unspoken assumption that ideology-free thinking
and remembrance are only possible through works of art is an ideological assumption par
excellence. What lies behind it is a naïve idea of the authenticity and purity of the artistic
position, floating in the air, divorced from any connections with social reality. The acuity and
the message of the documentary film thus end up hanging in mid-air. It does not succeed in
thinking the fascist politics of monument destruction and its vital role in the process of the
constitution of Croatian ethnic community. Instead Žižić wished to remain within the realm of

12
He does not take into account what is to be done with the monuments commemorating fascist past. This
is of vital importance in the context of the handling with the historical revisionism in Spain or Slovenia.
aesthetic discourse and his work could be summed up in a liberal self-referential formula:
what I do is art (a documentary film), in which I defend art (non-ideological monuments =
works of art) through art (aesthetic discourse).

b.) (Non-)Autonomy of Art: the Case of Antifascist Monuments in Yugoslavia

The question of the socialist autonomy of art regarding socialist monuments should
certainly not be overlooked. But we should start our discussion on aesthetics in a more
nuanced way than suggested by Žižić. How to reflect the relationship between ideology,
politics and art after the Second World War? Was there any aesthetic novelty or artistic
autonomy present in the construction of memorial sites? At first glance the answer is no.
There was a strong connection between the construction of monuments and different
dominant political groups. In the period between 1947 and 1965, the mass production of
antifascist monuments and memorial sites ensued. The Association of Veterans of the
Peoples’ Liberation War (SBNOR) with the help of federal authorities launched a project of
memorialisation and glorification of the Peoples’ Liberation War and struggle. The project
could be arguably defined as a paradigmatic socialist state art, which consisted of the
construction of minor symbolic plates, statues of different sizes, huge sculptures, murals,
paintings, graveyards and memorial parks. Formally they did not differ much from the cannon
of war memorials in other countries. They referred to three fundamental narratives of
liberation: victory over fascism connected to revolution; victims (suffering of civilians or
fighters during fascist occupation); historical context (location of particular antifascist acts,
foundation of political and cultural organizations…). They performed a normal function of
memorials: commemorating the past. But liberal critiques of totalitarianism would claim that
this type of memorialisation was merely an ideological project that had nothing to do with art.
Art was reduced to a mere ideological function, which represented the partisan struggle and
laid the basis for the Yugoslav ideology, its foundational myth: the Peoples’ Liberation
Struggle. As some authors maintain, this ‘official memory’ – being constructed by repressive
ideological means – was easily dissolved once challenged by the intellectual opposition in the
1980s (Denich 1994, Hayden 1994, Höpkin 1999). Undoubtedly, the ideological function of
these memorial sites is unambiguous: antifascist monuments played a direct and important
role in instituting rituals13. All school children had to visit particular antifascist sites and learn

13
As Althusser eloquently shows, ideology should not be only regarded as a mere imaginary
representation, but rather as practice. Indeed, here ideological rituals (everyday or symbolic ceremonial
repetitions) are of crucial importance. See his essay on ideological state apparatuses (2008).
about the historical background of antifascism and the Second World War. People learned
about the emancipatory past of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, contrary to the view that the
Yugoslav society was repressed and that the memory was a simple reflection of the Party
directives, which was imposed on ordinary people, Max Bergholz (2007) clearly shows that
ordinary people contested these memorial sites. As he points out, they reacted in many ways:
indifference (tying horses to them or letting grass cover them), subversion (telling jokes about
them) and direct confrontation (smashing them, preventing people from visiting them).
Already at that point, memorial sites were sites of ideological struggle, which affected the
perception of the Yugoslav revolutionary event. This memory of the event comprised of
affirming the radical novelty of the second Yugoslavia and emphasizing the international
antifascist solidarity of all Yugoslav people. Only through ideological struggle could the
‘fidelity’14 to the event be created. Similar politico-ideological gestures can be analyzed in the
movies of the Soviet directors that had to re-enact the October revolution for the masses
(Eisenstein’s film October in 1921 or Medvedkin’s films). It was through the aesthetical and
ideological domain that both revolutions were actually embraced by masses15. The Yugoslav
monuments cannot be regarded only as aesthetic, but should be analyzed as internally linked
to the revolutionary event of the partisan struggle. In other words, the Yugoslavian
memorialisation was a part of a complex historical process that linked ideology, art and
politics, where the political element – Yugoslavian social revolution – ‘overdetermined’ the
other two instances.

We showed how the construction of memorial sites involved the Veterans’

Association and the League of Communists, but that does not mean that it followed a doctrine
of ‘socialist realism’16, which was already in the 1950s substituted by Yugoslav modernism,
as we will show below. However, we should legitimately problematise the ideological effects
of the project of partisan memorialisation: the over-saturation of the partisan topic resulted in

14
We are touching a problem that Badiou’s theory of politics encounters, because it does not address
ideology to a larger extent. Our attempt of conceiving memorial sites is a sketch of a possible link between
politics and ideology, which can be found in thinking simultaneously event and the consequences of the event.
15
And in Yugoslavia, it was not only the memorial sites, but also films – the partisan genre became the
most popular genre –, which would create an ideological tie between the Yugoslav people and the event of
socialist Yugoslavia and partisan struggle. It is true that partisan films did not reach the aesthetic level of Soviet
cinematography, but they were equally important for the creation of the event. They should not be seen as
propaganda films but much more a popular genre of Yugowestern.
16
See Pavle Levi’s discussion on the end of socialist realism in Yugoslavia which came already with the
critique of Stalinism in the 1950s (2007). Artists could practice a relative freedom of expression and that was
also affirmed by a large production of alternative films, graphics, sculpture works, etc.
the emptying out of antifascism, which became an ossified official ideology17 without any
power of mobilization. This was an immanent danger, which resulted in the translation of
emancipatory politics into a simplified politics of memory. The question of how to reinvent
and re-mobilize people according to the non-national criterion was not endorsed or practiced
by any political agent in Yugoslavia18. /This section in shortened/ This pinpoints the
exhaustion of Yugoslavia as a revolutionary event and the historical defeat of the Left.
However, dissidents claim that the dissolution of the official memory happened because
Yugoslav society in the 1980s was not repressed any more. As if the Yugoslav façade of
‘brotherhood and unity’ collapsed with the death of Tito. Apart from this crude
psychologization of history, which reduces complex historical processes to individual, the
dissidents and liberals tend to forget the fruits of their own labour: it was precisely dissidents
and other national political forces which started an ideological battle that fuelled and sutured
the ideological universe to nationalism. The dissidents, liberals and parts of communist elites
succeeded in repressing the historical memory of the antifascist legacy, whilst the other
national stories of eternal hatreds resurfaced (‘we cannot live together’) and declared that
Yugoslavia was only an artificial entity condemned to die. The end of Yugoslavia was
executed, internally and externally19. The politics of antifascist memory was transformed into
a reinvention of a politics of ethnic memory and reconciliation, which prepared the ground for
the bloody break-up of the country. The dissident medals of honour were awarded with post-
Yugoslav independence and wars.

We agree with the dissident statement that we cannot search for a presupposed liberal
autonomy of art in the partisan memorials and films. But we arrived at this thesis from a
different angle: firstly, by rejecting an ideological assumption of art as an autonomous sphere
and secondly, by advocating an alternative view on the memorialisation of antifascism in
Yugoslavia, which was not simply imposed from above as the official memory but was a site

17
Some works of Laibach /NSK/, with the process of over-identification with fascist symbols, succeeded
in subverting the official ideology. Even though these artistic practices showed the (non)functioning of empty
formulas of instances of power (Party, Yugoslav People’s Army…), we need to stress how different was the
conjuncture of the 1980s from the 1990s. Also, art produced particular effects, which could be arguably assigned
either to alternative political practices or to nationalistic agendas. Should we retroactively then read NSK,
specifically Laibach’s critique of the Yugoslavian ideology as the other, alternative side of the Slovenian path to
independence?
18
The role of the Yugoslav People’s Army and the federal authorities will not be discussed here, but let us
only mention that they both fell into a deep political crisis and have started reacting to the situation instead of
formulating their own politics.
19
Since we do not have enough space here to open a discussion on the reasons for the break-up, or rather
the destruction of Yugoslavia, let us just mention a good summary of the literature and arguments presented by
Sabrina Ramet (2005).
of permanent ideological struggle. Things get a bit more complicated when tackling the
following alternative: socialist autonomy in the arts or socialist state art?20

Even though we revisited the antifascist politics of memory from a more statist viewpoint, we
would like to present the emergence of those artworks that broke with the mainstream cannon
of memorial sites. Admittedly, our task is not easy. How to envision aesthetical novelty and
art autonomy in the filed, which is saturated by politics, ideology and art? The path already
trodden by many art theorists and philosopher follow new aesthetical dimensions and
emancipatory practices in the Yugoslav cinema (e.g. Black wave), in graphics or in the
performative arts, such as body art (e.g. Marina Abramović). Yugoslav film, graphics and
body art affected the “distribution of sensibility”, produced new sensorial experience and
where later on internationally recognised art movements. Also, they were politically
subversive in the Yugoslav context, through them a specific artistic organisation developed.
Contrary to this path, we ask ourselves how to rethink the Yugoslav politics of memory?
Could the field that is sutured by morality on the one (the figure of suffering) and the state
politics of bearing witness on the other hand produce emancipatory effects or something new
aesthetically? The most regulated aesthetical form commissioned by Veterans Association or
Party contributing aesthetical novelty – isn’t this merely a nostalgic affirmation of the past?

As Žižić has already shown in the film Damnatio Memoriae, the fascinating memorial
enterprise of Vojin Bakić was internationally recognized as artwork21. But, here, we are not
interested in his artwork because of its pure artistic form, or even less in order to detach his art
from revolutionary politics. On the contrary, we will show how precisely politics intervened
in the artwork, although not in a directly statist way. In other words, Bakić’s spatial artistic
interventions produced political effects. Bakič’s interventions reconfigured the established
relationship between politics and aesthetics in the realm of memorials22.

Figure 3

20
This alternative in different variations appeared in discussions between Lenin and Bogdanov, where
they addressed the question what is to be done in the context of culture transformation: destruction of the
bourgeois past or constitution of the socialist culture? For a detailed discussion see Sachor (1988).
21
There are some other important artists, who produced similar modernist memorials such as Bogdan
Bogdanović and Miodrag Živković from the 1960s on. See an interactive map: http://fzz.cc/issue02PART.html.
As Robert Burghardt comments on the webpage: “those monuments have an abstract, often monumental, but
always unusual and peculiar formal vocabulary in common”.
22
We are indebted and inspired by Miklavž Komelj’s analysis of partisan art during WWII (2009), and to
Jacques Rancière’s project on rethinking relation of aesthetics and politics (2006).
Vojin Bakić was one of the most important Yugoslavian sculptors, working from the 1950s to
the 1990s. He conceptualized and constructed a series of antifascist monuments, which were
part of Yugoslavian modernism. Today most of Bakić’s monuments are in a poor state, sad
sites of slow decay. Furthermore, explosives destroyed a number of them: in Gudovac,
Karlovac, Bjelovar, Čizme, etc. One of his masterworks, which is to a certain extent preserved
was set up in 1981 and is located in Petrova Gora. The Petrova Gora monument
commemorates Partisan struggle and the battle of 1942, where two hundred Serbian villagers
were killed by Ustashi forces that were located on the top of the mountain.

At first glance the structure (see figure 3) is not recognizable as a typical antifascist
monument. The precise meaning of the sculpture is not clear. We also see no representation of
suffering victims or antifascist victors, there is no idealized figure of partisans. This sculptural
form is antifigurative and abstract. It completely negates the humanist moment of suffering or
victory, but at the same time strategically touches the question of re-presentation and
imagination of the partisan struggle.

What we see is a massive construction of steel and concrete, which is 37 meters high. From
the massive platform rise oval structures with round shapes, which are constructed in four
storeys that outgrow asymmetrically from one another. The sculptural work, or rather
building, reminds us more of a space station or a space shuttle, which apart from a firm
platform does not have any specific hierarchy that would imply a top-down pyramidal
structure. The sculpture looks as if it has emerged from a different world. We could easily
relate Bakić’s monument to Tatlin’s monument to the Third International. It repeats its
fundamental gesture: it forces the spectator to recognize a certain striving for the future,
whereas at the same time it reasserts the utopian character of the antifascist community that
formed and realized the event of Yugoslavia. Robert Burghardt nicely draws attention to this
uncommon dimension of Yugoslav modernist monuments:

They open the scene for numerous associations; they could be ambassadors from far-away stars, or
from a different, unrealised present. The openness which originates in the abstract language of the
monuments is a visual manifestation of the emancipation from the Stalinist dominance of socialist
realism in the eastern bloc, in which the future is represented only in a happy-overreaching form of the
present. The monuments invoke a utopian moment, stick to aniconism, and translate the promise of the
future into a universal gesture23.

Bakić’s monumental work opens a crucial parallel: couldn’t we relate this boldness, this
aesthetic novelty also as something that was internal to the politics of partisan struggle?
Because this struggle indeed produced something radically new in the situation, the pre-War
situation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, dominated by the Serbian Crown and semi-
peripheral capitalist mode of production. From the point of view of the old Yugoslavia (and
we can add also from the contemporary post-Yugoslav context) the antifascist struggle was
something unimaginable, a ruptural event that created a new political community, which was
based on internationalist, non-ethnic criteria. Yugoslavian liberation struggle was a national
liberation from the Nazi and fascist occupation and socialist revolution, which broke up with
capitalist social relations. From the very beginning liberation struggle included the
transformative dimension, the ‘not-yet-realized’, ‘not yet there’, the handling with Real24.
The principal political axiom was the axiom of equality, equality for all, egalitarian
community that fought against fascism and exploitation. Bakić’s monument evokes precisely
this craziness, boldness and novelty of revolutionary antifascist struggle25.

However, it is not only analogy between the novelty of art and politics that we would like to
advocate. Much more we would like to show how both fields get reconstituted in the process
acquiring new meanings. Our basic inspiration for this move is indebted to the lucid
interpretation of the relationship between art and politics from Jacques Rancière (2004). One
of his key theses claims that art becomes art only when it is identified with something that is
not art. Art becomes Art through non-Art. The case of memorial site was the privileged
investment of state politics, where the genre of memorial war art was interwoven in a meta-

23
http://fzz.cc/issue02PART.html. 27.5.
24
We will return to this later. For a more detailed account on Yugoslavia as socialist revolution and event
see Komelj (2009) and Pupovac (2008).
25
See also a thesis put forward by Branimir Stojanović (2003) on the status of Yugoslav revolutionary
war, which articulated a different answer to both Nazi total war and to the collaborationism of old forces.
narrative of victory or suffering which bounded art to ethics. The case of majority war
memorials testifies to the existence of this presupposed form, ascribed genre, which instituted
specific artistic cannon (socialist state art26). But as far as Bakić work is concerned, his
monuments do not refer to a canonical glorified image of the partisan or a suffering victim of
fascist violence. The case of ‘Petrova Gora’ refers to a utopian political community that was
operative during the Second World War. The antifascist partisan struggle was engaged in
establishing the new social structure, a new network of social relations that was historically a
negation of fascism (compare Močnik, 2005). Moreover, this political community did not
have only utopian dimension, but comprised of the real communist movement. The latter is a
movement that abolishes the existing state of things, as Marx argued in German Ideology
Through the impossible (trans)figuration of partisan and communist community Bakić
succeeded in reframing the sensorial experience signified by Yugoslav modernism. It
produced a double effect: firstly, his sculpture broke with the already established cannon of
memorial production in Yugoslavia. What was seen as the normal ‘distribution of the
sensible’ was subverted by a discomforting presentation of antifascist struggle, by a spatial
construction that triggered many responses. Against the socialist statist art approach that
represented the figure of the partisan, Bakić produced an abstract form, an antihumanist
sculptural intervention. This aesthetical novelty of memorial carries resemblances with other
works of Živković and Bogdanović, who together formed an art movement of memorial sites.
Only through their artistic practices could art autonomy or art itself be created. Their artworks
asserted the side of ‘not yet existing’ and by performing this, they had to articulate artworks’
relationship to the world in a new fashion. The critique of official ethical cannon was one
indicator, but also importantly was the political-symbolic layer, which addressed spectators in
a new way. It forces us to think about what monument stands for, or how it is connected to the
antifascist struggle. The abstract nature of the monument has something in common with the
abstract nature of partisan politics, politics that rests on the principle of equality and politics
that stood on the side of ‘not yet existing’, something that was fighting for new world. Next
important political dimension that was grasped by memorial site was articulation of the
agency of partisan struggle. It was neither a figure of the partisan nor the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia which was embodied in Bakić’s memorial. The figure of partisan struggle can
only be understood as masses of anonymous partisans that fought against the occupation and
collaborators. This collective anonymity is a feature of new modernist aesthetics.
26
Komelj shows how after the Second World War cultural circles started slowly imposing the bourgeois
criteria of art and advocated a bourgeois autonomy of art. This tendency was fought by a hardline Communist
party with a revised socialist realism, or subsumption of art under politics. These were both ideological positions,
which tended to erase the legacy of partisan art rupture (2009).
Against the moralization and humanization of memorial sites, we witness a revolutionary
politics of aesthetics. A lesson to be learned from this memorial, which is supported by
Rancière’s theoretical position, is the following: the alternative between socialist state art and
socialist autonomy is false. Artistic rupture always brings something new into the world; new
sensorial experience, and by doing so it is detached from the recognised ‘distribution of the
sensible’ or existing artistic cannons (state art). However, art cannot be seen as the only field
or form of life that would conserve the emancipatory promise that would be simply detached
from the ‘dirty’ reality. Artistic autonomy is not the protector of the failure of emancipatory
politics, which sooner or later can get consolidated in the state power, as Adorno seems to
suggest (Rancière, 2006). Bakić’s work thus created a certain interval, a gap between official
state ideology and mainstream artistic expression, a gap between socialist realism and art
autonomy, which made visible what was not visible before. Only through the impossible
presentation of the partisan masses and sculptural novelty does his work succeed in re-
animating or sustaining fidelity to the Yugoslav event. Revisiting the past, he opened up the
vision for the future: his insistence on the emancipatory past event is there only to force us to
act in the present. It arrived in this position only through a certain artistic labour, that is,
without being directly political (in terms of who the represented object/subject is) and without
ascribing a presupposed ‘artistic’ dimension (the existing cannon of ethics and socialist
realism), but only through this brilliant detour was Bakić able to produce the thinking partisan
monument. The monument is not an ethical herald of the future, but already claims the future,
which wants to re-affirm a past partisan gesture of international solidarity. Its reference to the
past is to continue in this contingent, emancipatory moment of the struggle, which always
already propels us into the future. Something directly opposite to the emancipatory politics of
aesthetics can be found in the contemporary memory politics in Slovenia.

II. The Slovenian Reconciliation as Oblivion of the Socialist Revolution and the
Antifascist Struggle

The Partisan movement and the era of the Second World War remain at the heart of the
discussions about Slovenia’s past. Steeped in the official ideology during socialism, the
interpretations of history are now anchored in diametrically opposed views on what happened,
views that divide the ideological sphere along the line between the Partisans and the Home
Guard (Domobranci).27 The political class is doing its utmost to neutralize the revolutionary
nature of the constitution of Yugoslavia and the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. The master
signifier of the discussion from the late 1980s has been ‘reconciliation,’ which called upon all
Slovenians to recognize the guilty parties and at long last to learn to live in harmony, in a
future free of traumas and upsetting memories. However, ghosts of the past still continue to
haunt the present.

What has happened to the Partisan heritage and monuments in the 1990s in Slovenia? The
politics of memory in Slovenia has taken a more subtle twist than the politics of destruction in
Croatia. This does not mean, however, that Slovenia was immune to subtle techniques of
domination that gave a foothold to rightwing ideologies. Among other things, the debate on
recent history has led to the introduction of the passive victims discourse and to a hunt for the
criminals of the former ‘totalitarian regime.’28 The end goal of this debate is the rehabilitation
of the Home Guard (the Slovenian fascists) and consequently, national reconciliation, which
in the words of Rastko Močnik is the ideology of the ruling class (2003). The Slovenian
nation, which was divided during and after the Second World War, should be reconciled with
itself. The first institution to venerate the Home Guard and anticommunism was the Catholic
Church, which has the political support of the rightwing political parties. In their quest for the
‘truth’ they received a huge boost when new monuments were erected. Thus we now have, in
addition to Partisan monuments, memorials to the Home Guard killed during and after the
war. History has had to be made more objective, and the victims commemorated.

The differences between the Home Guard and Partisan monuments in Slovenia can be
explained by the manner of presenting the victims/victors and their specific treatment of
history. We will present two exemplary memorial sites, which will illustrate the differences.
Figure 4 shows a sculpture of four partisans emerging from a larger block of sculpture.

27
The Home Guard, or in Slovenian Domobranci, collaborated with the German occupation forces and
fought against the Partisans in Slovenia. Before Domobranci, the White Guard collaborated with Italian
occupation forces, which capitulated in 1943. A civil war occurred everywhere in Yugoslavia during the Second
World War: collaborationist regime of Croatian state NDH (Ustasha) and the representative of the old
Yugoslavia Draža Mihajlović (Chetniks) fought against partisan forces and terrorized civilian populations.
28
For a critique of the theories of totalitarianism, see Žižek (2001). In the 2007-08 academic year the
Workers’-Punks’ University (Ljubljana, Slovenia) organized a series of lectures that critically assessed the role
and central theses of theories on totalitarianism (http://dpu.mirovni-institut.si/11letnik/Totalitarizem.php).
Figure 4
It was made in 1976 by Boris Kobe and Stojan Batič, in collaboration with Ive Šubic, who
made mosaic murals. It is located in Dražgoše and commemorates the historical site of the
first open battle between a small Cankar’s battalion of 200 partisans and a massive German
military force of more than 3000 soldiers. At the end of 1941, partisans in the Northern parts
of Slovenia were engaged in political and military resistance activities, they proclaimed a
people’s republic in Dražgoše and held some political and cultural events. When occupying
forces learned of their activities, they launched an offensive. After a three day battle, which
lasted from 9 to 11 January 1942, the German army conquered the village. The takeover of
the village was followed by a complete demolition of the houses, the execution of the
majority of the villagers and the deportation of the survivors to concentration champs.
Partisans succeeded in fleeing to the forest and subsequently strengthened their political and
military activities in that region. This small event prevented that the Slovenian region of
Gorenjska would be annexed by the German Third Reich29.

The figure shows an archetypal depiction of partisans in strong and active poses. Contrasting
to Bakić’s monument this memorial site has all the characteristics of typical war monument.
The partisans have boldly sculpted hands and weapons ready for use. We might imagine them

29
We must not forget that the Republic of Užice, a territory liberated by Yugoslav partisans in Serbia and
Dražgoše in Slovenia were the only liberated territories in the occupied Europe in 1941.
discussing their plans for defending their position and attacking the enemy, or how to get
away from the besieged area. They are portrayed as active and disciplined in their cause to
fight the occupation. This decisiveness is quite common in the representation of the partisans.
Partisan discipline and strong political convictions were held as very important characteristics
of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. Without a clear belief in political alternative leading
toward national liberation and social revolution, it is impossible to understand the zeal and
resilience of the partisan struggle. The situation of occupation and collaboration, with a
massive military presence, made partisan struggle impossible to grasp. The communist
leadership and veterans wanted to frame this heroic zeal and sacrifice to warn all next
generations that how this event guaranteed their existence. The partisan struggle became a
starting event of socialist Yugoslavia, but at the same time it was the official ideology that
sustained communist power.

The group sculpture is located in a broader memorial site, which comprises a path, a large
sculpture and a mural site, where the antifascist slogans appear. As is quite common with
partisan monuments, they bear active, antifascist slogans referring to the historical
circumstances of the occupation and the war. Inscriptions are thus frequently political and
historical and refer mainly to the victorious dimension of partisan struggle (‘To the people’s
heroes’), but also to the suffering dimension of the occupation (‘To the victims of the fascist
occupation’). This memorial site is still one of the most visited in Slovenia, now celebrating
the liberation struggle as the constitutive element of Slovenian nationhood.

In contrast to the heroic nature of partisan monuments, the suffering dimension dominates the
Home Guard memorials. Figure 5 shows a typical Home Guard memorial erected in 1998, in
Kočevski Rog, a site of post-war executions. This memorial bears the inscription: ‘Forgive’
(‘Odpusti’). The reference to morality and the Catholic Church is transparent and emphasized
with a cross in front of the monument. Most of of the Home Guard memorials are shrouded in
silence, and this one is no exception. Placed in the silence of a forest, as a home for the fallen,
lacking pomposity, they seem to avoid any historical reference. The memorial statue
expresses the moral element of depoliticised suffering; it appeals to piety and forgiveness as if
the civil war had transhistorical and eternal character. This monument participates in a
humble glorification of the victims of war and post-war executions. As with the majority of
Home Guard memorials this one also insists upon representing the victim rather than a
particular collaborator, but more generally a crucified Slovenian nation that had to experience
a civil war during the Second World War. It does not present us with historical arguments
from that time, but displaces the memory in the time after war: from the fascist occupation to
the civil war, or rather to the post-war executions. Instead of the new political subjectivity of
the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle, we bear witness to the post-war executions of a bad and evil
totalitarian regime.

Other less moralistic inscriptions can be found on the Home Guard monuments, the most
popular being: ‘Mother, Homeland, God’ or ‘Victims of revolutionary violence.’ The first
slogan embodies precisely the essence of political ideology that functioned in the first pre-war
Yugoslavia, which was based on Serbian and Yugoslav unitarism, conservativism and the
Church. The second slogan introduces morality also on the fascists’ side and is already framed
in the critique of totalitarian discourse. All of these conservative inscriptions do not present
the Home Guard members as active protagonists, but as victims, who found themselves
collaborating. These memorials share the basic pessimistic assumption that choosing sides
was more a matter of chance or fate than of political conviction and thought. This, however,
poses at least two problems: one is the positive interpretation of the Home Guard as passive
and innocent victims, and the other, the absence of an integral historical context of the Second
World War in the Home Guard memorials. The self-appointed interpreters of their meanings
are bishops and the new historians, who are the active witnesses of the passive victims and
provide us with ‘adequate’ historical context.

Slovenian monuments from the Second World War are structured like mainstream political
discourse. The latter remains divided between advocates of the Partisan movement and
advocates of the Home Guard. The Partisan side ‘passively’ defends certain aspects of the
Peoples’ Liberation Struggle, while the Home Guard side actively persecutes the post-war
‘totalitarian’ terror, which they locate in the communist leadership. Although the two camps
are opposed, they share a common goal in the debate – reconciliation. Reconciliation of the
Slovenian nation happens through the rituals of mourning for the victims of both sides.
Instead of the egalitarian community of partisans, which was not a national community, but
the community of everyone that joined the struggle against fascism and struggling for new
world, the reconciliation discourse launches a nationalized subject. The monuments play the
crucial role of wrapping the debate in a cloak of dignity and respect for the spirits of the dead.
It is in the national interest to appease political passions and to write a more objective truth,
rather than to maintain the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, if we all belong to One Nation.
However, reconciliation does not have the same meaning for both sides. While both agree that
the post-war killings executions and collaboration with the enemy were problematic,
reconciliation nonetheless equates with a neutralization of how novel and crucial the Partisan
movement was in Yugoslavia. At worst, reconciliation is no less than the rehabilitation of
fascism and the Home Guard. Immediately the rehabilitation puts the Home Guard and the
Partisan movement on the same footing and condemns the totalitarian regime that was
established after the war. The Home Guard comes out as the moral winner that had nothing to
do with the criminal post-war regime. Thus reconciliation can be possible when we become
ashamed of our communist past and come to forgive fascism. The political maxim of the
Home Guard supporters could be termed in the following way: ‘Let us reconcile with the
fascist past. The Home Guard committed some crimes during the war, but so did the
communist regime after the war’. For supporters of the Partisan standpoint, on the other hand,
reconciliation means acknowledging the post-war killings executions and praising a certain
aspect of the politics of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. It is a defence of the Peoples’
Liberation Struggle as the core of Slovenian nationhood, as if the struggle had only been
about national independence. In this way the reconciliation discourse of both sets of
supporters produces a twofold effect: a reduction in the importance of the Peoples’ Liberation
Struggle in the history the Slovenian nation-state and a condemnation of everything that came
after the Second World War up until the end of the 1980s. The reconciliation discourse30 thus

30
In his paper (2008) Miklavž Komelj pointed out that ‘national reconciliation’ was a key dimension in
Ciril Žabot’s fascist national programme of breaking up Yugoslavia. National reconciliation has a reactionary
background, stemming from a biologistic biological conception of a nation; it was reactivated during the 1980s.
A very interesting thesis on the contextualization of national reconciliation was put forward by Lev Centrih: “In
the broadest sense, it has been understood as a call for the mutual recognition and respect of all sides engaged in
the conflict, on the grounds that they all belong to the same motherland, to the same Nation, even though they
may perceive their devotion differently and are marked by errors and crimes. Nation and motherland have been
completely relativizes the debate about the Yugoslav socialist project and attempts to erase all
revolutionary traces of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. If Slovenian memorial policy did not
destroy antifascist monuments, as happened in Croatia, it produced similar political effects.

We must admit that the whole history of the Yugoslav revolution is not erased from public
discourse: even though it is moralized, there is a revolutionary trace, which persists as a
remainder. The advocates of the ‘new truth’, the Home Guard supporters, have structured the
debate around it. This trace is also the chief traumatic kernel of the debate: the post-war
killings of the revolutionary ‘totalitarian’ terror. Despite the incorrectness of this argument,
which we have already mentioned, one truth has, paradoxically, been made manifest. The
post-war killings were part of the revolutionary terror, but there was no totalitarian regime at
that time. Firstly, any serious historical study can assert that Yugoslavia was a type of
authoritarian state (the undemocratic rule of the League of Yugoslav Communists), which on
some levels (economy, culture) practiced a relative freedom (self-management, worker’s
participation, local communities). Secondly, revolution cannot be simply equated with
totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt argues on various places. If revolution is the destruction of
the old Order and if revolution happens in the conditions of war, as it happened in Second
World War Yugoslavia, one could not avoid violence (Badiou, 2005). That does not mean that
we should leave out a fierce condemnation of excesses and repression of the Communist
Party’s policies during and after the war. There were different ways to prevent violence and
excesses, but this was not on the agenda of Liberation Struggle. However, the defenders of the
collaborationists (Home Guard) are not interested in political theory and historical discussions
about the emergence of Yugoslavia and problems of Liberation Struggle, but in revising
Slovenian history and putting forward only moral claims with practical consequences: they
count the bodies and condemn the criminals31. When all criminals will be condemned,
reconciliation will be possible. In the light of this moral re-articulation, the Partisan side has
been pushed into the corner. It has passively accepted the guilt and accepted the terrain of the
moralizing discourse. Instead of presenting a broader defence of the transformational effects
of the antifascist struggle, the Partisan side has backed down into defending merely the
national aspect of the PLS. The final outcome of the debate, which will be legally binding,

perceived as pre-given qualities of every individual, that is, as essentially separate from one’s affiliations to
political, production, or ideological practices.” (2008: 70-71)
31
In his speech at the closing ceremony in Teharje (5 October 2008), the Bishop of Celje, Anton Stres
said that all crimes had perpetrators, and that these should be named. For more on this, see:
http://www.rtvslo.si/modload.php?&c_mod=rnews&op=sections&func=read&c_menu=1&c_id=184117&tokens
=stres. It would probably not be inappropriate to start with the institution represented by the Bishop.
shall be presumably resolved by Slovenian Parliament in the year 2010, but that does not
mean that memorial sites and discussions will cease to exist.

III. Rethinking the Partisan Liberation Struggle as Socialist Revolution

We do not need to pinpoint the Home Guard’s guilt or moral responsibility for their crimes
during the Second World War. We previously outlined the way the Home Guard defenders
displaced the debate into the realm of morality and transhistoricity by removing the historical
context of the antifascist struggle. In no way can the Home Guard’s fascist domination and
their support for old Yugoslavia and the occupation regimes be equated with the revolutionary
Peoples’ Liberation Struggle. The Partisans were recognized as part of the broad coalition of
antifascist forces from 1943 onwards. The Home Guard collaborated with the fascist and Nazi
occupation forces, and this predates the post-war executions32.

How to understand the novelty of partisan antifascist struggle and defend their cause vis-à-vis
collaboration? We will try to present our case with the help of Alain Badiou’s insights in the
prologue to his Metapolitics (2005). Starting from a different historical conjuncture, Badiou
poses the question of what made people join the French Resistance. Two tendencies
predominate in the context of the revisionist discussions in France. One proclaims that
wartime France was Pétainist, where collaborators at worst knowingly collaborated with the
occupiers, or, in the more moderate interpretation, collaboration was a matter of pragmatism.
It was better to wait and not resist. The other tendency is antifascist and declares France to
have been ‘resistant.’ It thinks the political decision through two considerations which,
according to Badiou, do not suffice for thinking politics. One trend (Sartre) sees joining the
Resistance in terms of a personal decision, that is, a moral choice and a matter of an
individual’s conscience. This is a case of a ‘subjectivity of opinion’, as Badiou says. The
other, communist interpretation reduces joining the Resistance to an objective fact. It reads
the situation by sociologically analyzing the social groups, and retroactively instates class as
the decisive moment for joining the Resistance. According to Badiou, choice cannot be
thought either as a collective imperative (objectivity) or as a personal decision (the
subjectivity of opinion) related to moral opinion, external to the situation itself. In Badiou’s

32
We do not want to deny the post-war executions, but we have to take into account general circumstances of
war and revolution. There were certainly different ways of dealing with fascists at the end of the war. The post-
war killings were consequences of personal revenge, revolutionary terror with war tribunals that rapidly
liquidated fascists. After the Second World War many fascist collaborators that fled to Austria were sent back to
Yugoslavia by British forces. Some of them were emprisoned, while the majority of them killed.
words, “… this resistance, proceeding by logic, is not an opinion. Rather it is a logical rupture
with dominant and circulating opinions … (T)he Resistance was neither a class phenomenon
nor an ethical phenomenon.” (2005: 5-6) In short, resistance is a rupture with the existing
situation: “When all is said and done, all resistance is a rupture in thought, through the
declaration of what the situation is, and the foundation of a practical possibility opened up
through this declaration.” (2005: 8) Thinking in the circumstances of the Second World War
meant risking, risking thought and opening the bounds of possibility toward the Real, the
impossible. To think meant inevitably joining the Resistance. Those who did not think
remained tied to that situation, a situation that blocked any risk-taking. Badiou sums this up
axiomatically: “Not to resist is not to think. Not to think is not to risk risking.” Positing
politics as thought, which for Badiou is material and has material effects, gives us a different
means for understanding the issue of the antifascist struggle itself.

Apart from this equation between politics and thought, we should evaluate the additional
complexity of the Yugoslavian Peoples’ Liberation Struggle.33 To be clear, both resistances
had universal dimension and were part of the same international struggle against fascism, but
at the same time they also had different political consequences. It is not that Yugoslavian
Liberation Struggle is morally superior from the French Resistance, but it produced a major
rupture with the pre-war Yugoslavia. The French Resistance was disbanded and disarmed
after the war; it did not produce lasting consequences in terms of new political forms, or in
other words, it did not transform social relations from pre-war France. It remained a nation-
state in the core capitalist system. On the other hand, the Yugoslav Partisan struggle
comprised, in addition to national liberation, a social revolution, which was a definitive
rupture with the old Yugoslavia. The Peoples’ Liberation Struggle was not merely resistance,
but a revolutionary event, which transformed social and national relations of pre-war
Yugoslavia. Also, it started a cultural revolution, where immense creativity and novelty was
effectuated by the entrance of masses into the sphere of culture (see Komelj, 2009). Partisans
during the war liberated large portions of Yugoslav territory, where they build up new
political forms, such as the people’s councils of antifascist struggle, which organized cultural
events (theatre, graphics, poetry), educational infrastructure, political meetings to mobilize

33
We share the important contribution to understanding politics by Badiou. His thesis on the correlation
between thought and politics can explain the historical fact of young people joining the Partisans en masse,
although not all of them were members of the Communist Party; they did, however, think the situation both from
the national and the revolutionary perspectives. If not right from the start, Another thing to be added here is that
the antifascist fight in Slovenia was not exclusively in the domain of the Communist Party; rather it was a mass
political movement of the Liberation Front.
masses and basic conditions for economy. Participation of masses in the struggle and culture
for the building of new world was of major importance by the Liberation Struggle and by new
revolutionary government (AVNOJ, 1943). The Yugoslav struggle had long-term
consequences and cannot be grasped without understanding the dynamics of the class
contradictions of the old Yugoslavia. New Yugoslavia was an event with triple dimensions:
the international antifascist struggle as universal dimension, which was at the core of new
Yugoslavia (Yugoslavia was not a nation and did not have one national language, see Buden
2003); a social revolution, which entailed the introduction of new class relations and a
transition to communism, socialist Yugoslavia (see Kirn /2009/ and Pupovac /2006/); and a
cultural revolution, which meant the break up with the bourgeois cannons and art autonomy
and the entrance of masses to the sphere of culture (Komelj, 2009). It is important to note that
national liberations took place for the first time in history in all the nations and nationalities of
Yugoslavia. All nations were recognized,34 while the Serbian bourgeoisie lost the hegemony it
had had in the old Yugoslavia. The antinationalistic stance became one of the official
guidelines of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia until the mid of the 1980s. The path
towards communism was less successful, although an important contribution to the
organization of the socialist society was attempted (self-management) and Yugoslavia’s role
in the non-aligned movement should not be overlooked. But this is already a different story
for different occasion.

Conclusion

From the 1990s onwards the post-Yugoslav context underwent a veritable revisionism in the
ideological state apparatuses with degrading political effects. The field of official and
everyday discourse has become imbued with liberalism, nationalism and reconciliation. The
most insistent nationalistic tendency appeared in the revision of history, of a glorious national
past and a demonized Yugoslav past. The national history was rewritten, school curricula
were changed or are still being changed35. One of the most exemplary illustrations of
historical revisionism is undoubtedly the dramatic change in the landscape of monuments. We
contrasted two different politics of memory: firstly, the Yugoslav memorialisation of
antifascist struggle and secondly, the post-Yugoslav memorialisation of segregated ethnic

34
The issue of Kosovo Albanians was unresolved also in the new Yugoslavia. The idea of a Socialist
Balkan Federation, which would eliminate the substance of ‘Southern Slavs’ (Yugoslavia), was suppressed by
both Stalin and Churchill; in this way the burning question of the division of Albanians among several countries
was avoided, a question that remains open to this day. For more on the idea of this federation see Samary (1988).
35
We have not touched on the case of Bosnia, where the recent war and nationalistic effects are still most
present. Also, one cannot really anticipate the reconciliation in Kosovo.
communities. The Yugoslav politics of memory after the Second World War entailed complex
intertwining of political, ideological and artistic practices. The erection of monuments dealing
with the Yugoslav event was not simply imposed from above, but accepted and negotiated by
broad masses of the population. A number of memorial artworks from Bakić, Bogdanović and
Živković resulted in the revolutionary politics of aesthetics termed “Yugoslav socialist
modernism”, which remained loyal to the Yugoslavian rupture and could be viewed as a
certain politics distinct from the existing state art. The revolutionary politics of aesthetics
proclaimed antifascism and introduced a new aesthetic cannon, new ways of seeing and
doing. These artists succeeded in erecting true monuments to the Yugoslav Partisans that
activated thought in ‘thinking monuments’36.

The post-Yugoslav politics of memory answered to the challenge of Yugoslavia in many

ways: ranging from the repression of everything that is Yugoslav, destruction politics to the
reconciliation and commemoration of fascism. Against the internationalist Yugoslav
community it launched ethnically segregated communities. A bloody break-up of territories
was the consequence of the coalition of liberal (technocrats) and nationalist ideologies
(cultural intelligentsia, reformed communists) and not a natural consequence of a totalitarian
regime. It was an anti-totalitarian dissident ideological offensive that significantly contributed
to the break-up. In order for a successful launch of myth ‘it is impossible to live together with
other nations in the same community’, post-Yugoslav politics of memory needed to erase
anything that was deemed “Yugoslav”. In opposition to the Yugoslav socialist politics of
memory linked to revolutionary politics, the post-Yugoslav politics of memory is linked to the
rehabilitation of fascism and legitimization of ethnic cleansing. Not drawing from messianic
aspect of Benjamin, but repeating his gesture to affirm a specific past seemed to be a l’ordre
du jour. The fight to affirm the antifascist past and the condemnation of fascists’ destruction
of monuments is thus to be grounded not on moralistic, but on political grounds. It should
rethink the radical difference of the constitution of revolutionary Yugoslavia and its bloody
destruction. To stress the revolutionary nature of the partisan struggle means to politicize and
intervene in the national-moralistic discourse of reconciliation. Only on the ground of past
emancipatory politics can we understand the dissolution of Yugoslavia and current
restorations, and also get some insight into future emancipatory politics. There are many
questions that have to be addressed in this light including how the extreme nationalists came
to the power in the late 1980s and hegemonized the ideological field; how and when the

36
See Wajcman (1998) for an interesting psychoanalytical reading of Geertz’s ‘anti-monuments’.
democratic ‘civil society’ became nationalized; and what reasons exist for the destruction of
Yugoslavia? Without addressing these questions and affirming the Yugoslav politics of
emancipation we can only be content with the ideological post-Yugoslav train that leads
toward the end of history.

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