“Balkanization” of National Memories and Identities Trauma: Different Discourses on Holocaust “Victim – Perpetrator” Identity and Its Specific Political Functions in Ex-Yugoslavia States

Abstract

The politics of specific selective social/national memories in contrast with globally accepted and promoted pictures of the past happenings is always a very interesting field for anthropological research. This paper also deals with another social phenomenon — the political usage of the dead bodies, or “political lives of the dead bodies” of the Holocaust victims buried on ex-Yugoslavian territories. We will try to show and understand the process of changing political and historical context and its influence on the way Yugoslavia and, later, its independent states used history and traumatic social memory presentation to recreate new views on these happenings and, therefore, new national identities. Using this kind of analysis we will show how the “victim” and “perpetrator” identities were reconstructed and used in different ways and to different purposes. These recreated identities are supposed to be very important factors in the Euro integration, but also a part of the revisionism threat and power struggle in the Balkans today.