Lecture: Vjeran Pavlakovic: Remembering Lost Causes: Memory Politics from the American Civil War to the former Yugoslavia

The lecture Remembering Lost Causes: Memory Politics from the American Civil War to the former Yugoslavia analyzes several case studies where memory politics have directly contributed to the strengthening of a “lost cause” movement, subsequently radicalizing contested narratives of the past. While coming to terms with the past allows a society to critically examine the legacy of violence or civil war, there is also a danger of legitimizing defeated ideologies, from European fascism to chattel slavery in the American South. With an ultimate goal of developing a framework of a positive culture of memory in post-conflict Croatia, this paper’s comparative approach seeks to draw the lessons from “lost cause” memorializations including the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The U.S. Civil War spawned the original Lost Cause, codified in the motto “The South Shall Rise Again.” What began as a process to honor fallen confederate soldiers with dignified final resting spots spawned a political movement that perpetuated segregation, racism, and human rights violations. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the defeated Republican side and its International Brigades were likewise glorified among leftists in Europe, the United States, and especially socialist Yugoslavia. The wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s opened up numerous questions regarding the taboos of the Second World War. While those who had died fighting on the “wrong side” had been completely excised from official memory, the pluralization of collective remembrance also resulted in the rehabilitation of the collaborationist regimes they had supported.

Vjeran Pavlaković is the Head of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his PhD in history from the University in Washington. He has written extensively on the politics of memory, commemorations, war crime tribunals, political symbols, sites of memory, and democratization in the post-Yugoslav space. Before the University of Rijeka, he worked at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and had a postdoctoral fellowship of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), where he conducted the research „Red Stars, Black Shirts: Symbols, Commemorations, and Contested Histories of the World War Two in Croatia“.

Pavlaković is a member of the project In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe (ISTME) which aims to go beyond the nationally oriented memory studies that tend to reify the bond between culture, nation and memory, investigating the transcultural dynamics of memory in Europe today. In addition, he is a participant in the drafting of the REKOM (Regional Truth Commission for the former Yugoslavia) Statute.

His recent publications include: The Battle for Spain is Ours: Croatia and the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (2014), “Symbols and the Culture of Memory in Republika Srpska Krajina,” Nationalities Papers (2013), and “Fulfilling the Thousand-Year-Old Dream: Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in Croatia,” in Pal Kolsto, ed., Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe(2014). He co-edited the books Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society under Milosevic and After (2005) published by the University of Washington Press and Confronting the Past: European Experiences (2012).