Denial and Repression of Anti-Semitism: Post-Communist Rehabilitation of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic

3. Collective Remembering and Collective Forgetting: Memory of Nikolaj Velimirović and the Repression of Controversy

ChaPter three Collective Remembering and Collective forgetting Memory of Nikolaj Velimirović and the Repression of Controversy ivan Kuzminović: “We have just canonized the famous Bishop nikolaj. this is a man who writes in his book Nationalism of St Sava that adolf Hitler is a man who will promote [the values of st sava]… Do you want me to give you the exact quote? i can read it out, i have it here.” Vladimir Đukanović: “You know, he was in Dachau. so, he was so in favor of Hitler that the latter then placed him in Dachau?” (Debate among students from the University of Belgrade in the documentary “Why people Whisper in Church?” [“Zašto se u crkvi šapu- će?”] Anem/TV B92, may 19, 2005) Bearing in mind the controversies surrounding the biography of nikolaj Velimirović which were examined in the previous chapter, it might be argued that the maintenance of the positive memory of his life and legacy involves a significant amount of forgetting. the perpetuation of the representation of Velimirović as a positive historical figure and respectable authority can be said to be contingent upon a continuous process of not remembering things like his association with nazi collaborators , his antisemitism, or the positive evaluation of Hitler which appears in one of his essays. the emphasis on “forgetting” is not new in scholarly work on collective memory. peter Burke (1989), for instance, argues that the study of social remembering necessitates the exploration of the “organisation of forgetting, the rules of exclusion, suppression and repression” (p. 108). the means by which uncomfortable, troubling, and traumatic episodes from the past can be kept away from popular consciousness is also considered by Henri Rousso’s Vichy Syndrome (1991), peter  Denial and Repression of antisemitism novick’s Holocaust Remembered (2001), and iwona irwin-Zarecka’s Frames of Remembrance (1994). in literature on collective memory, the notion of social forgetting is frequently alluded to as “repression,” drawing on the vocabulary of freudian psychoanalysis. according to freud, repression or “willed forgetting” (Bower, 1990) refers to the driving away of troubling thoughts and impulses from conscious awareness (e.g., freud, 1914, 1916, 1933, 1940). it is a mechanism that protects the conscious part of the self, the ego, from threatening and potentially damaging unconscious drives and desires. the use of the concept of repression in literature on collective memory stems from the possibility that “groups, like individuals, may be able to suppress what is inconvenient to remember ” (Burke, 1989, p. 109). Recent years have seen a reaction against the reliance on psychological terminology in the study of social remembering (Kansteiner, 2002; novick, 2001; Wertsch, 2002; Wood, 1999). Wulf Kansteiner (2002) for instance, argues that, when considering collective phenomena , psychological terminology—including words such as “repression ,” “amnesia,” or “trauma”—is “at best metaphorical and at worst misleading” (p. 185). He contends that “we are best advised to keep psychological or psychoanalytical categories at bay and to focus, rather, on the social, political and cultural factors at work” (p. 186). the objection to the drawing of parallels between individual and collective memory rests on the belief that the former is regulated by various “laws of the unconscious” (Wood, 1999, p. 2) and specific mental processes (including repression), the ontology of which is in the human brain. Collective memory, on the other hand, is seen as “disembodied ” and devoid of an “organic basis” and in that sense as more abstract and elusive. it consists of “texts” or representations originating from “shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored in the life of the world of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective” (Kansteiner, 2002, p. 188). Because of the assumed ontological difference between collective and individual memory, iwona irwin-Zarecka (1994) argues that, in the domain of social remembering, there can be no “unexpressed memories” stored in the unconscious, and therefore no “repression” as such. for aspects of the past to be preserved in the public consciousness , they must be continuously present in the life of the community  Collective Remembering and Collective Forgetting through the “full information base of remembrance”: commemorations , celebrations, monuments, museums, and publications (see also terdiman, 1993). put simply, only that which is “publicly known and spoken about” is committed to memory (irwin-Zarecka, 1994, p. 195). Conversely, for something to be forgotten, its recollection in public discourse must be suspended. memories are confined to oblivion by...