ABSTRACT
Confrontations with history burst onto Yugoslavia’s political scene almost immediately after Tito’s death in 1980. In the political vacuum created by Tito’s departure and filled by grave economic woes, a range of theatrical works, novels, political memoirs, and new historical accounts began to address both previously glossed-over crimes of Nazi collaborators in World War Two (the Croatian Ustashe, Serbian Chetniks, and the Muslim Handžar division) and previously unmentioned communist crimes. In the years that followed, further complicated by new wars, new violence, and new state crimes, battles over collective memory included the naming and renaming of streets, retouching of photographs and historical records, purges of public libraries and bookstores, rewriting of textbooks, cleansing and reconstruction of museum spaces, destruction and rebuilding of monuments. 2
