From Skull Tower to Mall: Competing Victim Narratives and the Politics of Memory in the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

Yugoslav Dubravka Ugrešić became a Croat when her country fell apart. Now self-exiled to Western Europe, living in what she calls the ‘No-Zone’, a space transcending national identities, Ugrešić here distills the essence of historical memory research. Helen Pohlandt-McCormick likewise remarks ‘the “collusion” of violence and silence in the constitution of memory and history as it outlines the fragmentary and disjunctive relationships between individual and collective memories and public, resistance, and official narratives’ (2000, p. 10). The history of modern Yugoslavia clearly illustrates this problem. For Tito’s ‘brotherhood and unity’, instituted to promote a unified ‘national consciousness’ (Fanon, 1967), pace Fanon, suppressed the violent ethno-national rivalries of Yugoslavia’s civil war, whose ethnies had long enshrined their respective pasts in both ethno-national ‘histories’ and the cultural memorials that embodied them.

National history is the hyper-revised biography of the nation. The authors of the new histories relate to history as to gossip; that is, they know that it takes far longer to deny or re-fashion gossip than to create it. And they know that few people are interested in later revision. So gossip, myths and confabulations often become great national truths.

(Ugrešić, 1998, p. 271)