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Blowing Up Brotherhood and Unity: The Fate of World War Two Cultural Heritage in Lika

Following the widespread destruction and interethnic violence of World War Two, the socialist regime in Yugoslavia initiated a massive reconstruction and modernization project within the framework of a social revolution. Rejecting the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s attempts at forging a single Yugoslav identity and the radical nationalist extermination agendas from 1941-1945 (particularly by the Ustaša and Četnik movements), the new political elite sought to create a federal state with increasingly autonomous republics that was nonetheless ruled by a single Party. Since the one-party system established by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ, renamed the League of Yugoslav Communists in 1952) and its wartime leader, Josip Broz Tito, based its legitimacy on the victory of the Partisan resistance movement, memory politics after 1945 relied heavily on preserving the monopoly over the Party’s narrative of the war. One of the key elements of this narrative, quickly incorporated in all segments of society after the war, was the motto of “brotherhood and unity.” Rather than focus on the internecine bloodletting, the official version of the past emphasized the unified struggle of all of Yugoslavia’s peoples against foreign occupiers and domestic collaborators. Under the motto of brotherhood and unity, the regime allowed individual national identities to flourish in each of the country’s six republics, but used repressive means against any perceived appearance of nationalism or anti-government dissent. This text offers an introductory overview of the construction and transformation of World War Two cultural heritage in Lika during the socialist era (1945-1991) and then the transformation – oftentimes destruction – during the Croatian War of Independence and the nation-building project of the 1990s. Rather than presenting an exhaustive list of the fate of all monuments in Lika, I have chosen to portray the memory landscape in broad brushstrokes punctuated by more detailed descriptions of several significant sites that remain contested politically.

Memory, Second World War, monuments, Lika

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