Contribution short abstract:

In a memoryscape dominated by ethno-nationalist narratives that attempts to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina through uncommoning Socialist Yugoslav heritage, the staff of the History Museum engage in commemorative practices that highlight inter-ethnic solidarity, resisting the erasure of a common past.

Contribution long abstract:

With the dissolution of Yugoslavia into various sovereign states in the early 1990s, conflict broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), which ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement and the fragmentation of the country into two entities and a district. The inadequate legal framework together with the lack of coordination has resulted in memorialisation practices in BiH where the majority group is able to commemorate their victims and armed forces in line with ethnonationalist narratives and at the same time preclude those that have been constructed as “other” from engaging in memory work that marks the sites of atrocities. This spatial uncommoning of the region has been accompanied by revisions of the past where ethnic groups are depicted as distinct, separate, and defined by their opposition to one another. Since the breakup of Socialist Yugoslavia, memorials of the Second World War that were once used to promote ‘Bratstvo i jedinstvo’ or brotherhood and unity have been destroyed, left to ruin, or appropriated by ethnonationalist leaders to attest to the supremacy of their particular ethnic group. The aim of this paper, however, is to shift focus to commemorative practices in the History Museum of BiH, that labour to create spaces of shared belonging and resist the erasure of a common past. Through the recent opening of the permanent exhibition 'Wer ist Walter,' this institution strives to conserve the heritage of a common struggle against fascism and in so doing speaks of a Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Yugoslav, and European past.