Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia

Jelena Đureinović holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, where she teaches in the Department of History. Her research deals with the history and politics of memory of the Second World War in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space with the focus on the process of reinterpretation of the Chetnik movement in Serbia. She was a visiting research fellow at the Moore Institute in Galway, the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz and the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies in the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She has published on Europeanisation and memory politics, memory laws, discourses of victimhood under communism and relations between memory cultures in Croatia and Serbia.

"Firmly situated in the discipline of history, but drawing upon a wide variety of theories, methodologies, and case studies from memory studies, transitional justice, and other interdisciplinary fields, Jelena Đureinović’s timely book is an excellent and ground-breaking study into the problematic issue of memory politics in contemporary Serbia and its ramifications for other Yugoslav successor states. Đureinović’s cutting edge research will be eye-opening for scholars working not only on the Balkans but for those outside the region, revealing how post-conflict and post-communist societies like Serbia are susceptible to manipulation by politicized mnemonic actors." – Vjeran Pavlaković, University of Rijeka, Croatia"In this well-researched and very convincing book, Jelena Đureinović demonstrates the processes of systematic politics of right-wing revisionism in Serbian history politics, adding new insights to our understanding of strategies, agency and power within history and memory politics. Đureinović’s thought-provoking work draws our attention to the dangers of forgetting, deliberately ignoring and downplaying crimes of the past, and to the dynamics of reinterpreting history to fit political demands and needs in the present. We should remember that such revisionism inevitably contributes to changing society’s understanding of the present and thereby also to shaping fears and expectations of the future, and Đureinović’s excellent research is an important reminder about how this works." – Tea Sindbæk Andersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark"This outstanding book is the first comprehensive look at the remarkable transformation of political memory of World War II in contemporary Serbia. Đureinović convincingly demonstrates that in its commitment to anticommunism, Serbia has embarked on a full scale revision of its WWII memory. This study is a timely warning of the seriously political consequences of playing politics with the past." – Jelena Subotić, Georgia State University, USA

• 1. Introduction  2. Exploring politics of memory  3. Yugoslav memory culture and its downfall  4. The Milošević era  5. Memory politics in post-Milošević Serbia  6. Unearthing the past  7. Anti-communist memory politics from below  8. History, memory and law  9. Rehabilitation of Dragoljub Mihailović  10. Conclusion