engleski

Jasenovac Uses and Misuses of the Past: Manipulations and Historical Revisionism Surrounding the Biggest WWII Camp in the Balkans

In this introductory chapter, we aimed to analyze two main questions: 1) why Jasenovac became the central element of historical contestation in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and 2) which elements of the Jasenovac storytelling are specifically contested. Putting the problem of Jasenovac within the larger framework of social memory construction and – consequently – construction of social reality, we have suggested that discursive construction of Jasenovac cannot be perceived outside its foundational events – those of immense human suffering which is ultimately inexpiable. The challenge of ‘describing the indescribable, ’ yielded in strategies of conceptual, numeric, and descriptive representation of the past. Each of them, as frequently demonstrated in this article, has also produced a host of debates, predominantly in Croatia and Serbia, which have strong emotional-communal appeal, but questionable historical veracity.

Jasenovac, contested history, politics of memory, naming, counting, describing

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