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17. Between Marginalization and Instrumentalization: Holocaust Memory in Serbia since the Late 1980s
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516 jovan byford 17. Between Marginalization and Instrumentalization Holocaust Memory in Serbia since the Late 1980s Comparative studies of the treatment of the Holocaust in postcommunist Eastern Europe, published over the past two decades, have paid little attention to the countries of the former Yugoslavia, especially in comparison to the interest shown for developments in, for instance, Hungary, Poland, or Romania. With the exception of the criticism directed during the 1990s toward the revisionist writing of the former Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, attitudes toward the Holocaust in Yugoslavia’s successor states have received at best a passing mention. In fact, the controversy surrounding Tudjman’s work appears to have deflected scholarly attention away from other postYugoslav societies—including Serbia—creating the impression that, in terms of the reception of the Holocaust, the situation there has been by and large unproblematic. Although a number of scholars have examined the misuse of Holocaust imagery by Serbian nationalists in the late 1980s and 1990s and have considered the effects of postcommunist transition on Jewish identity in Serbia, the impact of these and other developments specifically on the public remembrance of the Holocaust has hitherto remained unexplored.1 Part of the reason Yugoslavia has been overlooked in the relevant literature is that for much of the postwar period, the country was largely devoid of the institutionalized anti-Semitism that existed in other parts of Eastern Europe, the kind that attracted the attention of Western scholars. This helped keep the country off the radar of critical scholarship, and the situation after 1989 can be seen, to a large extent, as a continuation of this longer tradition of neglect. Yet Serbian society has not been immune to the problems that 17. Between Marginalization and Instrumentalization 517 plague Holocaust memory in other parts of postcommunist Eastern Europe. In Serbia, as elsewhere, the post-1989 transition was accompanied by revisionist trends in national historiography and the revival of right-wing nationalist political ideas that influenced public reception and understanding of the Jewish tragedy under Nazism. At the same time—again, like elsewhere in Eastern Europe—these emergent interpretations of the Holocaust were built upon the established patterns of remembering (rooted in the “socialist” memory culture), marked by a pronounced reluctance to recognize the specificity of the Holocaust. As this chapter will show, these developments produced two distinct but related processes that dominated Holocaust memory in Serbia after 1989—instrumentalization and marginalization . On the one hand, the Serbian nationalist elite appropriated the memory of Jewish victims of Nazism and used it selectively and strategically to accentuate the pivotal motif of Serbian nationalism, that of Serbian suffering. On the other hand, Serbian society on the whole persevered in a disinclination, dating back to the days of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to think of the Holocaust as a unique historical event and a distinct topic of remembrance. The continuous interplay between instrumentalization and marginalization persists to the present day, even though in recent years Serbian commitment to European integration has been calling for a new perspective on the Holocaust, one that is marked by a greater sensitivity to its distinctiveness and universal importance. The Destruction of Serbia’s Jews, 1941–1944 On the eve of the Second World War, approximately thirty-three thousand Jews lived within Serbia’s current borders.2 A third were Sephardim, whose ancestors, after fleeing Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, put down their roots in parts of the Balkans under Ottoman rule, including large parts of today’s Serbia. The rest were Ashkenazim, mainly second- and third-generation migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, who settled in the regions of Banat and Baþka, the southern borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which in 1918 became part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Serbia’s prewar Jewish community was concentrated in urban cen- [3.209.56.116] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:57 GMT) 518 byford ters, especially Belgrade, Subotica, and Novi Sad. According to official statistics from 1940, the majority of Serbia’s Jews were either involved in trade and commerce or were in white-collar employment (mainly clerks and civil servants), although there was also an established tradition of artisanry, especially among the Sephardim in Belgrade . Harriet Freidenreich writes that while Jews in Serbia could “by no means be considered affluent and some poverty did exist among them, for the most part they were comfortably situated,” and what is more...