The book brings together many of the best known commentators and scholars who write about former Yugoslavia. The essays focus on the post-Yugoslav cultural transition and try to answer questions ...about what has been gained and what has been lost since the dissolution of the common country. Most of the contributions can be seen as current attempts to make sense of the past and help cultures in transition, as well as to report on them.
The volume is a mixture of personal essays and scholarly articles and that combination of genres makes the book both moving and informative. Its importance is unique. While many studies dwell on the causes of the demise of Yugoslavia, this collection touches upon these causes but goes beyond them to identify Yugoslavia's legacy in a comprehensive way. It brings topics and writers, usually treated separately, into fruitful dialog with one another.
Davor Konjikušić provides an in-depth presentation and contextualization of the photographs created by Yugoslav partisans between 1941 and 1945. In doing so, the author is not only interested in ...presenting the photographs from an aesthetic perspective, but in the history of their use and function within one of the biggest anti-fascist movements in Europe during the Second World War.
After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, no-one was prepared for the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. Suddenly old terms like chetnik and ustasha found new currency, and a new term surfaced – ...'ethnic cleansing' – with its sickening echo of 'final solution'. The upsurge of nationalist sentiment in Eastern Europe raises the question whether the wars in the former Yugoslavia are harbingers of things to come. Will the racist idea of the ethnically pure state crush the humanist ideal of the multicultural society? Yugoslavian Inferno provides a rich analysis of the complex issues that brought about the demise of Yugoslavia and the ensuing fratricidal warfare. It pays particular attention to the role of religion in fanning the flames of interethnic hatred and is written by a scholar uniquely placed to write it. A Yugoslavian- American with roots in both Croatia and Serbia, whose religious tradition is Protestant, rather than Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim, Paul Mojzes is an internationally recognized authority on religion in Eastern Europe. Based on travels in the region, interviews with politicians, scholars, and religious leaders, as well as news accounts and monographs in generally inaccessible languages, and formulated after a lifetime of scholarly achievement, Yugoslavian Inferno presents insights that only a native can provide and the critical objectivity that only an outsider can offer.
Between 1914 and the present day the political makeup of the Balkans has relentlessly changed, following unpredictable shifts of international and internal borders. Between and across these borders ...various political communities were formed, co-existed and (dis)integrated. By analysing one hundred years of modern citizenship in Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav states, Igor Štiks shows that the concept and practice of citizenship is necessary to understand how political communities are made, un-made and re-made. He argues that modern citizenship is a tool that can be used for different and opposing goals, from integration and re-unification to fragmentation and ethnic engineering. The study of citizenship in the ‘laboratory’ of the Balkands offers not only an original angle to narrate an alternative political history, but also an insight into the fine mechanics and repeating glitches of modern politics, applicable to multinational states in the European Union and beyond.
This book fills a gap in the historical knowledge of wartime Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Chetnik movement provides a better understanding of the various ways that important segments of the ...population, including members of the Yugoslav officer corps and Serb civilians, perceived and responded to the occupation. The partisans' ultimate success does not conceal the fact that during the greater part of the war, several armed groups, owing at least some sort of allegiance to Mihailovic, chose very different courses of resistance. The overriding question for Milazzo is how a movement whose leadership was in no sense pro-Axis found itself progressively drawn into a hopelessly compromising set of relationships with the occupation authorities and the Quisling regime. What was it about the situation in occupied Yugoslavia and the Serb officers' response to that state of affairs that prevented them from carrying out serious anti-Axis activity or engaging in effective collaboration? The author attends to the emergence, organization, and failure of the Chetniks, the regional particularities of the movement, and Mihailovic's efforts to establish his own authority over the widely scattered non-Communist armed formations. The author also discusses the domestic opposition to Tito and the complex reality of the national and political civil war in Yugoslavia.
During Europe's 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however; immigrants from the Balkans have ...streamed into West Germany in massive numbers throughout the long postwar era.Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germanytells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated to Germany as political emigres, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and war refugees from 1945 to the mid-1990s. While Yugoslavs made up the second largest immigrant group in the country, their impact has received little critical attention until now. With a particular focus on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants, Christopher Molnar argues that considerations of race played only a marginal role in German attitudes and policies towards Yugoslavs. Rather, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was most profoundly shaped by the memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. Molnar shows how immigration was a key way in which Germany negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war.
