The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"Firmly situated in the discipline of history, but drawing upon a wide variety of theories, methodologies, and case studies from memory studies, transitional justice, and other interdisciplinary fields, Jelena ?ureinovic's timely book is an excellent and ground-breaking study into the problematic issue of memory politics in contemporary Serbia and its ramifications for other Yugoslav successor states. ?ureinovic's cutting edge research will be eye-opening for scholars working not only on the Balkans but for those outside the region, revealing how post-conflict and post-communist societies like Serbia are susceptible to manipulation by politicized mnemonic actors." - Vjeran Pavlakovic, University of Rijeka, Croatia

"In this well-researched and very convincing book, Jelena ?ureinovic demonstrates the processes of systematic politics of right-wing revisionism in Serbian history politics, adding new insights to our understanding of strategies, agency and power within history and memory politics. ?ureinovic's thought-provoking work draws our attention to the dangers of forgetting, deliberately ignoring and downplaying crimes of the past, and to the dynamics of reinterpreting history to fit political demands and needs in the present. We should remember that such revisionism inevitably contributes to changing society's understanding of the present and thereby also to shaping fears and expectations of the future, and ?ureinovic's excellent research is an important reminder about how this works." - Tea Sindbaek Andersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

"This outstanding book is the first comprehensive look at the remarkable transformation of political memory of World War II in contemporary Serbia. ?ureinovic convincingly demonstrates that in its commitment to anticommunism, Serbia has embarked on a full scale revision of its WWII memory. This study is a timely warning of the seriously political consequences of playing politics with the past." - Jelena Subotic, Georgia State University, USA