The Confiscation of Memory

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 218, 1996, Pages 26-38

  Ugresic, Dubravka ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0030514939     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. These lines by the Russian avant-garde poet Aleksandar Vvedenskij contain the message that for everything to become comprehensible one should start living backwards.
2. A Yugoslav pop-star who was more popular in the Soviet Union than she was in Yugoslavia.
3. A completely forgotten Yugoslav 'musical cretin', somewhat like the Czech Karel Got.
4. Kapetan Lesi, the handsome, brave hero of Yugoslav Partisan films shot in the early sixties, completely forgotten today. He seems to have 'died' in China as well.
5. 'Vegeta', seasoning for food, a popular Yugoslav export article, can still be found in Turkish shops in Berlin or Russian shops in New York's Brighton Beach. Together with 'Minas-coffee' - known affectionately as 'minasica' - 'Vegeta' has become a cult object for the Yugoslav diaspora.
6. 'Unless you do these Crazy Things. . .', an Interview with Robert Opie, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds, The Culture of Collecting, Cambridge 1994, p. 29.
7. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, London 1995, p. 14.
8. The artistic representation of history often follows the idea of the commercial surrogate. Thus the American artist David Lowenthal represents the holocaust by using miniature children's toys - little ss-officers, little camps and camp inmates - photographed to reproduce well-known documentary scenes.
9. A note by the Sarajevo journalist Branko Vukovic describes a moving episode: a conversation with a young Sarajevo sniper of Muslim nationality. The soldier, who had 'freaked out', said that, remarkably, the only thing that really 'turned him on' was the book Eagles Fly Early. This children's book, by Branko Copic, is a highly emotive topos of the cultural memory of several generations of Yugoslavs. The episode is, of course, virtually untranslatable, its emotional impact, weight and symbolism can be understood at this moment only by former Yugoslavs, and only by those of them who are resistant to nationalist hatred - a minority, that is.
10. One of the freshest examples is the Croatian town of Knin. For several years Croatian state propaganda used Knin, 'the cradle of the Croatian kings', to construct national memory. Knin and its surroundings were populated by rebellious Croatian Serbs. In August 1995, when Knin was 'liberated' - that is, when the Croatian Serbs were driven out en masse - and when the Croatian flag was placed on the Knin fortress, the town lost not only its manipulative-propaganda value but also its 'memorial' value. At this moment, Knin is a town of ghosts, deserted, and plundered by the Croats themselves. There are identical examples on the Serb side. One such 'hot' manipulative topos in the Serbian national memory is Kosovo, inhabited by the Kosovo Albanians.
11. Minister and Croatian writer, the signatory of the racial laws in Pavelic's Nazi statelet.
12. In her book Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass. 1994), Svetlana Boym ends her investigation of Soviet everyday life with the observation: 'And so it goes: one wishes to cure nostalgia through history, but ends up simply historicizing one's own nostalgia.'
13. At one time, I had imagined a project of collecting 'mental souvenirs' of life in former Yugoslavia and asked my friends and acquaintances to participate. Regardless of social, cultural and generational differences, I was interested in knowing whether it was possible to identify a common corpus of emotional topoi in our memory. The meagre 'material' I collected proves that such research is impossible. Predrag Dojcinovic, a poet and essayist who lives in Amsterdam exile, contributed his 'souvenir', a description of the wrapping on 'Buco' cheese, a little square of processed cheese with the hideous portrait of a fat boy on the wrapping. This detail suggests not only the capriciousness of nostalgia but also its 'untranslatability' into other cultures, in other words the exclusivity of collective memory, its absolute copyright.
14. Lepa Brena, an unusually popular singer of 'newly-composed traditional' songs, the last 'adrenaline' unifying the cultural topos of the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia. Up until the last moment, she declared herself a Yugoslav. Today, Lepa Brena, a Muslim by nationality, in order to save the remnants of her market, declares herself a Serb.
15. The film director Zelimir Zilnik conducted an unusually interesting test of collective memory in his documentary film Marshal Tito Among the Serbs Again. He took an actor with a remarkable physical resemblance to Tito, dressed him in a marshal's uniform and let him walk the streets of Belgrade. Although all the passers-by knew that he was a surrogate, nevertheless, many of them, forgetting themselves, spoke with the surrogate as though he were Tito himself.
16. The first car manufactured in Yugoslavia.
17. Zdenko Lesic, ed., Children of Atlantis: Voices from the Former Yugoslavia, Oxford 1995.
18. I quote Cicero's story from Frances A. Yates's book, The Art of Memory, London 1992. I am grateful to Nenad Ivic for drawing my attention to this account.