Deconstructing monuments, rebuilding memory by Anna Marangoni
In a region where the scars from recent conflicts have not yet healed, the processes for the construction of collective memory and the commemoration of past events contribute to shape the driving forces of a society and to mould its passions. Since sixty years, the territories of former Yugoslavia are subject to ideological and propaganda pressures that strongly influence the memorial buildings: if Tito has imposed for forty years the celebration of the great partisan epic of the Second World War, and of the great “brotherhood ” of Yugoslav people, since 90s the nationalist forces have made a clean sweep of this unified vision in favour of the commemoration of “their” victims and the demonization of the others. In both cases, demagogues have imposed partial and rhetoric versions of the past and hushed up the alternative interpretations.
The memorials in Western Balkans – as in many other areas that at the end of a conflict have to deal with a regime change – represent an element for an historical analysis that helps to clarify the practices of the construction of collective memory.
We are often inclined to consider a monument in its physicality; we are attracted by its visual impact, its way to fit in the landscape. We often consider its celebrative value as a stable and unilateral element, free to historical changes. However, if we try to understand the history of a society, it is important to remember that the memory is closely linked to the representations made by social groups and well-defined communities, and that its material translations tell us about which part of the past wants to be told and which does not. In other words, the group interest is able to ensure that in a specific moment it is valued only what has a strong identity frame.
The past can be forgotten through the lack of a material representation and of a place of memory. In Serbia, for example, no monument was built to honour the victory, heroism or the ’90s wars’ victims. Why? Nataša Kandić, Director of the Centre for Humanitarian Law in Belgrade, reminds us that Milošević used to repeat that Serbia was not at war. As consequence, there were no places to dedicate to the victims or winners and no opportunity for historians to open a debate on the figurative representations of the war.
Other times the monuments themselves speak about silence and invisibility: as the historian Heike Karg tells in her essay Monuments’ Biographies. Sketches from the former Yugoslavia, a memorial – due to the social element of mutual-recognition which it transmits – reveals an absence and includes oblivion. What is forgotten? First of all, the enemy and its victims.
It is necessary to be able to “read” a monument and understand its biography, by studying the practices of remembering and forgetting who accompanied it in different historical periods. We will discover that the monuments have been sometimes “rewritten”, moved from their original context and used to pay tribute to new events, new heroes and new victims. This is what happened to Budrovci, in Croatia, where the monument which was originally dedicated to the liberators of the Second World War today honours the memory of the Croatian fighters of the civil war of the ’90s. Or even to Srebrenica, where the commemorative monument of Serbian victims of the First World War, hidden for 50 years, was brought back into place after the conquest of the city in 1995.
Obviously, the physically destruction of the memorials is one of the most immediate and emblematic way to delete the memory: in the early ’90s, in Croatia, around three thousand monuments in honour of the “war of national liberation” (as it was called the Second World War) have been destroyed or damaged, and museums closed one by one. The ‘information center panorama” in the National Park Tjentište-Sutjeska in Bosnia and Herzegovina was destroyed during the ‘90s and defaced by graffiti.
The creation of a monument, as the establishment of a museum, help to identify the processes of building the collective memory, but at the same time they can also tell a story that reinforces particularisms, stigmatizes the past events or, worse, cries out for revenge. In the whole area of former Yugoslavia, both at the political level and at civil society level, it is necessary to build a shared and historically documented vision of the events which happened in the ’90s. This is the fundamental act in the process of reconciliation and of development of a peaceful culture of recognition of “the other”. The “biographical” reading of the monuments, the deconstruction of the rhetoric memory and the contribution that such analysis can bring to the building of new memorials, must be taken into account in the arenas where it is designed the future of a territory where, hopefully, we will hear a multitude of voices committed to build a common memory.
For more information check: http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/
Anna Marangoni: anna.marangoni@coleurope.eu
