ABSTRACT
This chapter deconstructs how the main political groups and military formations, active in Yugoslavia during Second World War (WWII), are presented in contemporary history textbooks written in the language that used to be dominant in Yugoslavia—that is the textbooks from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. It answers these questions by utilizing history textbooks as a lens through which to examine the ongoing contestations of WWII memories in the post-Yugoslav states. The most positive and often quite romanticized picture of Partisans is portrayed in the Montenegrin textbook and those written in the Bosnian language. In Bosnian-language textbooks the Partisans are described as the only genuine anti-Fascist military formation: "the largest anti-Fascist movement in enslaved Europe". The greatest differences concern the interpretation of the Chetniks, who in the Serbian textbooks are considered to be one of the two main anti-occupation forces, while they are unambiguously defined as collaborators and perpetrators of war crimes everywhere else.
