Remembering the Partisans and Yugoslav socialism : memories and counter-memories

english

2017

volume year 23, issue 1

World war II    National liberation movements    Reminiscing    Slovenia    politics 

Društvo antropologov Slovenije
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

The aim of this study is to investigate the politics of memory and the transformations of memories of WWII and socialist Yugoslavia in the present-day Slovenia. I focus on the grass-roots, bottom-up memories that invade Slovenian public space, and I investigate 174 in-depth interviews with the middle- and old-age people. In this regard, the Slovenian nation is divided, positive memories of Yugoslav socialism's well-being and prosperity and the heroic Partisan struggle strongly clash with negative counter-memories of communist repression and Partisan inter-and post-war killings of Home Guards. The forced forgetting of WWII, the Partisans and Yugoslavia, which is promoted also by politically institutionalised top-down politics of memory, is created also in the popular, bottom-up memories of the informants. Such memory politics foster antitotalitarian and anti-communist discourses, creates Communism as the Other and produces Slovenian nationalism. Moreover, it blurs the WWII liberator-aggressor paradigm, when it suddenly becomes unclear who was liberator and who was aggressor during WWII, and it absolutely equates Hitler's Nazism with Communism.

15.02.2018