Remembering a Failed Utopia: Reception and Interpretive Communities of Memory

Abstract

Many scholars of collective memory suggested more attention should be paid to the individual beliefs about the past and reception of collective memories. Still, empirical studies tackling this problem are few or limited to surveying the recall or remembrance of the political events. The present study seek to address this empirical gap by examining the reception and negotiation of presentations of the recent controversial past of the communist Yugoslavia among two Croatian post-Yugoslav generations: transitional (b. 1978-81) and post-communist (b. 1989-91) generation. These individual presentations of the Yugoslav past were gathered through 72 in-depth interviews. My analysis identifies the dominant perspectives on Yugoslavia among the young Croatians, it compares these individual accounts with those available from the history textbooks and newspapers in 1991-2007, and it also identifies generational, educational, regional and class patterns among the individual presentations of Yugoslavia. The findings suggest the necessity of complementing the studies of production of memory with their reception. The young people dominantly remember the failed Yugoslav regime in positive terms of better social relations and better lives, and they still hold a positive image of the Yugoslav President Tito. However, these dominant individual memories are notably absent from the textbook and newspaper accounts of Yugoslavia which focus on the negative political, economical and ethnic re-evaluation of the former regime. In addition, such social lenses of Yugoslavia are particularly salient for the least educated, and thus most socially vulnerable, subsection of the sample, while there are little generational differences