New Memory of the Old Trauma? The Diary of Diana B. and Dara of Jasenovac
Ana Kršinić Lozica ffzg.academia.edu
Recently, there has been a significant rise in the production of films on the Jasenovac camp and related Ustasha crimes, taking their share in the mnemonic politics. The paper focuses on the two most recent films, The Diary of Diana B., a docufiction
Happy coincidence and personal enthusiasm were the main promoters for an unusual doctoral workshop which I recently co-organized at the University of Basel, together with my colleague Prof. Bilgin Ayata. We invited two acclaimed film directors, Lordan Zafranović from Prague/Zagreb and Nezahat Gündoğan from Istanbul, to watch and discuss their documentaries on genocidal violence in their home countries Croatia and Turkey, with the aim to explore, in a gendered approach, their visual methods as a means to negotiate violence and memory both from the victim's and the perpetrator's perspective. In her documentary 'Hay Way Zaman. Dersim'in Kayıp Kızları' [Unburied in the Past: The Missing Girls of Dersim] (2013), Nezahat Gündoğan explores the cleansing of the Kurdish, Alevi and Christian population of Dersim/Tunceli in Anatolia during the late 1930s through the eyes and memory of Emoş Gülver, one of the girls who went missing in the period. Lordan Zafranović's 'Zalazak stoljeća. Testament L.Z.' [The Decline of the Century. The Testament of L.Z.] (1993) is a personal account of Croatia's liability for the genocide on Serbs, Jews and Roma in the Ustaša state NDH (Independent State of Croatia) during World War II, and denunciates the state-building of Croatia in the early 1990s on the base of the old Ustaša symbols.

Review by Aleksandra Kolaković Aleksandra Kolaković, "Nevena Daković (ed.), Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media", S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. DocumentatiON (2016) 1,, 146–149. ISSN 2408-9192 The Holocaust is one of the most important themes in historiography – not least for its historic relevance. Within the rich history of the Balkans, marked by wars, shifts of borders, and discontinuity, the Holocaust as a topic was, until recently, only explored by historians. But the picture of the greatest sufferings in human history is constantly changing, meaning that the Holocaust must be examined from various perspectives in order to reach an objective conclusion. The academic conference Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media, which took place from 2 to 4 October 2014 in Belgrade, investigated new modes of (re)viewing the Holocaust in arts and media. Edited by Nevena Daković, professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade, the conference proceedings include 14 academic papers published on various aspects of the topic; the project was financially supported by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, and realised in partnership and cooperation with the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, the Centre for Culture and Cultural Studies in Skopje, the Belgrade Youth Centre and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. As David Bathrick 1 has pointed out, visual representations of the Holocaust have proved to be an absolutely integral but also highly contested means by which to understand and remember the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War. These vehicles of memories and memorial complexes, the black-and-white photographs of the concentration and death camps, as well as the memories of traumatised survivors , are given new meanings in the contexts of arts and media. The conference attempted to map the corpus of different arts and media texts, systematise it, and use it for constructing a multidirectional memory of the Balkans' past. Special attention was paid to the role of the culture of remembrance, the institutionalisation of memory , film, and other aspects of memory and their interpretation. The focus of papers written by eminent researchers and compiled in the conference proceedings Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media is on the language of arts and media, and the aesthetic, ethical, political, philosophical and historical engagement with the Shoah. One group of papers is dedicated to representations of the Holocaust in film, radio and television in the Balkans from the Second World War to the present day (former Yugoslavia, Serbia, Bulgaria, former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). In the article (Im)possible Witness: The Revelation of the Himmelkommando, Nevena Daković reveals how cleverly the eponymous film from 1961 moved the limits of representation.

Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research) in 2011. This resulted in increased institutional efforts to pay more attention to Holocaust education and commemoration. However, critics have observed that many of these state-supported initiatives use the Holocaust to conceal the state’s role as perpetrator or accomplice in mass war crimes and genocide committed during the Second World War and during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Against this backdrop, I discuss two recent Serbian Holocaust novels, Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes (2006) and Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes (2005), and Goran Paskaljević’s film When Day Breaks (2012). I argue that Holocaust memory in these works does not function as a ‘screen memory’ – one memory that covers up or suppresses other, undesired memories – but as a prism through which memories of the recent Yugoslav past as well as stories of present injustice, which the dominant political elites and mainstream society would prefer to forget or not to see, are filtered and brought to light. Ivanji, who is well acquainted with the politics of memory both in Germany and Serbia, also reflects critically upon the current globalization of Holocaust remembrance, thus providing feedback on the possibilities and limits of the memorial culture stimulated by the ITF.

In this article the authors discuss the role of Jasenovac Concentration Camp in Croatian and Serbian political and social spheres. Connecting the historical data with the analysis of the recent mutual accusations of genocide between the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Serbia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the authors demonstrate the pervasive presence of Jasenovac in Serbian and Croatian political discourse. Presenting different modes of social construction around Jasenovac, from the end of the Second World War to the present, the article proposes a specific reading of Jasenovac as a form of the " past that does not pass. " In this respect, Jasenovac is seen as a continuous reference point for understanding collective losses and group suffering, both past and present, in Serbian and Croatian society. although historically distanced by seventy years, the events surrounding Jasenovac are still constantly recurring in both political and private, official and unofficial, spheres of life, functioning as a specific symbol around which narratives of ethnic, national, and religious understanding as well as inter-group conflicts are thought and constructed. The role of political and social factors in the construction of frequently incompatible narratives is further underlined by the analysis of selected oral testimonies related to the war in Yugoslavia in 1990s.

This article examines memory culture and its evolution in socialist Yugoslavia. In particular, it considers how the postwar Yugoslav state aimed to come to terms with the mass intercommunal violence precipitated by the occupation and the rule of various local fascist organizations. Using the case study of the Ustasha atrocities in Glina in the spring and summer of 1941, two of the most infamous massacres in wartime Croatia, it explores how the authorities in the postwar federal Republic of Croatia aimed to create a common narrative which stressed the state's guiding principles of brotherhood and unity while addressing the fact that the massacres had been committed by members of one ethnic group (the Croats) against members of another (the Serb minority). It also examines how artists and writers were mobilized in the campaign to make sense of genocide and the fratricidal slaughter of the 1940s, in particular through creating a sharp division between "Ustasha criminals" on one side and the mass front of "patriotic Croatian working people" on the other. The article uses the moving testimony by the sole apparent survivor, Ljubo Jednak, and the haunting photograph said to depict the Glina victims shortly before their mass execution to unravel how it was that this specific war crime came to acquire such a central place in the canon of Yugoslav historiography of the Second World War as a meta-symbol of the horror of fascist occupation. The article argues that while the official narrative about the occupation of wartime Croatia and the genocide committed by the Ustasha regime appeared to be hegemonic, in reality from the outset there was significant contestation about what had happened in Glina and the meanings that were attached to the massacres. Despite the efforts of the party to control and mediate the terms of the memory politics, especially within the Serb community, they were never totally successful. Moreover, since the narrative about the Second World War was closely connected to the legitimation of the revolution, national liberation struggle and the postwar retributive purges, many of the core tenets of Yugoslav memory politics, as the example of Glina illustrates, did not remain monolithic but changed over time to reflect broader ideological and national changes within the Yugoslav federation. This particularly became apparent in the late 1960s in the wake of the mass national movement in Croatia. By the time armed conflict broke out in the early 1990s between the newly-independent Croatian state and its Serb minority, the memory politics of the Glina atrocity which had sought to bring Serbs and Croats together as Yugoslavs and overcome national enmity was already helping to divide them along ethnic lines. As such, the memory politics of Glina represented a metaphor for the rise and fall of the Yugoslav ideal. Serbs and Croats, like the victims in the photograph, were frozen by the lens of history, increasingly separated by different conceptions of the past and the meanings that should be taken from it. Keywords: Glina, photography, genocide, memory culture, Ustasha regime, wartime Croatia, socialist Yugoslavia