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"Ballade of the Hanged Man". World War II Atrocities and Representational Strategies of Memorial Sculpture in Socialist Yugoslavia

The post-WWII crisis of artistic expression can be analysed as a consequence of collective war trauma and individual artists’ experience with unspeakable human suffering and mass murders. The extent of this issue had been summed up in Adorno’s famous claim that writing poetry after Auschwitz was an act of barbarism. In practice, however, collective and individual need to remember, as well as political obligation to commemorate the victims, remained present in all post-war societies. Despite new interpretations of symbolic, aesthetic and utilitarian functions of a memorial, it also remained an important tool of manifesting political power by offering a “sacred” place of keeping war traumas alive. The representation of war atrocities in socialist Yugoslavia in the medium of memorial sculpture was mainly focused the victims of the fascist occupational regimes and their local collaborators. Such commemorating practices also served as permanent reminders of the importance of the Yugoslav Partisan movement and the Socialist revolution for the liberation of the people, and as such, as the legitimization of the post-war political power of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. A frequent subject of the memorial sculpture representing the atrocities of the WWII in Yugoslavia was the practice of public hanging of the captives and innocent victims, which the enemy considered to be an efficient way of deterring the insurgents and thus weakening the strong antifascist resistance. By analysing different examples of sculptural and architectural treatment of the subject, located throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia, the aim of this paper is to define main artistic strategies used by sculptors and architects when approaching the difficult task of public mediation of the memory of war suffering: from the translation of the motif from photographic to sculptural medium (Valjevo, Opuzen), through different degrees of sculptural reduction and/or deconstruction of human figure (Ljubljana, Subotica), scenographic/architectural recreations of the site of the terror (Gospić, Zaječar), to the almost complete abstraction of the motif itself (Zagreb). The aforementioned difficulty of artistic representation of public hangings seem to have had resulted in the departure from the realistic treatment of human figure, and had let to the proliferation of formal approaches to the subject. Innovative sculptural treatment of such publicly sensitive and politically important subject, which often corresponded to artists’ latest experiments in the sculptural medium and resulted in some of their best public works, makes an important contribution to the understanding of the complex phenomenon of the development of memorial sculpture in Yugoslavia since the mid 1950’s.

Memorial sculpture; World War II; hanged men; iconography; representation of trauma

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