The Partisan Counter-Archive

Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle

Gal Kirn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110682151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material – from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films – and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

Chapter 1 The Three Impossibilities of the Partisan Counter-Archive: Politics, Art and the ­‘Anti-memory’ of Rupture

Guerrilla warfare is a people’s warfare; an attempt to carry out this type of war without the population’s support is a prelude to inevitable disaster.

Che Guevara, 1963 (Guerrilla Warfare – A Method)

I don’t care a spit

for tons of bronze;

I don’t care a spit

for slimy marble.

We’re men of kind,

we’ll come to terms with our fame;

let our

common monument be

socialism

built

in battle.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1930 (At the top of my voice)

This chapter consists of three parts: in the first part I will assess the political dimensions of the People’s Liberation Struggle (1941–1945), namely, how this struggle succeeded in subtracting from the old political powers (the Yugoslav government-in-exile, London) and in winging against the fascist collaborationists and the fascist occupation, therein triggering social revolution; in the second part of the chapter I will analyse the emergence and significance of Partisan art that created a symbolic imaginary for the struggle itself; and in the last part of the chapter I will ask how and why the Partisan struggle – as early as during the war – expressed a need and a strong desire to commemorate the contemporaneous rupture.

Various revolutionary consequences stemmed from the People’s Liberation Struggle, ranging from the materialisation of federalism, international solidarity and socialist struggle to women’s emancipation and cultural revolution.³¹ The most important for this book will be the analysis of Partisan revolution from the perspective of a specific encounter between politics and art, which was accompanied, during the struggle itself, by the powerful commemorative expression/imagination of that very Partisan revolution. This potent encounter, the richness of artists’ form and their complex temporality, form the basis of the Partisan counter-archive. The project travels through the fields of politics, art and memory and departs from questions such as: how was it possible to perform revolutionary acts in the harshest circumstances and despite all the odds? How did the Partisan counter-archive reorient and construct a new future? And how did that gesture and practice herald and symbolically facilitate the new world? I will also attempt to answer the question of what the Partisan counter-archive embodies and what incited it initially to begin a process of decolonised and liberated commemoration: was it the figure of the Partisan, the struggle itself, Partisan Yugoslavia and “unity and brotherhood,” or was it rather the modality of the de/re/territorialisation of liberated territories? The modality of “becoming Partisan” will be central to the conception of the counter-archive and this is why the next sections will present several major characteristics of pre-war Yugoslavia and the beginnings of the Partisan struggle.

1.1 The ancien régime of Yugoslavia prior to WWII: The “prison-house of nations” and economic exploitation

The interwar Yugoslavia emerged after World War I as a Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The heterogeneous territories with diverse people and nations came together in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and under the tutelage of the Serbian aristocracy, which formed a part of the “small entente” during the war. From the very beginning the kingdom was split by major political and economic antagonisms. These were present in the very first constitution of 1921 that subscribed to a centralist and unitarist conception of Yugoslavia, which won out over the ‘autonomist’ and clerical version supported mostly by the Croatian Peasant Party and the Slovenian Clerical Party.³² After the imposition of royal dictatorship in 1929, the kingdom received a new name: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, whereby all political life was limited to superficial struggles between the two biggest officially permitted parties.³³ The new kingdom not only existed at “the periphery of the capitalist world system,” but according to a recent study by Lev Centrih, the state found itself at the “periphery of the European semi-periphery that was dominated by fascist regimes” (Centrih 2011, 112). In the mid-1930s, the ruling class in Yugoslavia increasingly relied on the Italian and German economy and drew its political ideas from their theories of fascist corporativism. To define the old Yugoslavia from the mid-late 1930s as a semi-­fascist dictatorship is not at all a controversial claim, if one takes into account the brutal exploitation of the people and domination of small nations/nationalities and repression of all political opponents (Magaš 1993, 23–27). Any political activity was banned and many activists or members of leftist groups and organisations were exiled, imprisoned or executed. From at least 1935, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia instituted a set of prison-camps for political opponents, most notably for communists and fervent nationalists.³⁴Since the level of economic exploitation was particularly severe, the period before WWII was marked by numerous strikes and illegal protests. The latter were met with police brutality, capital punishment and the forced migration of protest organisers.

In these circumstances, support for socialist and communist forces began to rise even if the Communist Party remained weak, fragmented and until 1937 operated in exile. This was also the year when the party leadership took a few major decisions: to support the republican side in the Spanish Civil War by all means, to gradually prepare a united popular front against fascism and to revise its former policy of Yugoslav centralisation.³⁵ Yugoslav Communists started adopting federalist ideas, which were confirmed in a series of new autonomous parties: for example, the Communist Party of Slovenia and Communist Party of Croatia were formed (Magaš 1993, 27–28) Tito’s rise to power within CPY came precisely in this time. But as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia intensified the repression during the time of the Spanish Civil War and immediately before WWII, most of the CPY leadership were imprisoned. On the eve of war in early 1941, the CPY membership counted only 7,000 members. However, this relatively small grouping had a strong and long-term illegal organisational network in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and was joined by some 200 fighters-survivors from the Spanish Civil War and concentration camps (Pavlaković 2016), who all held a strong belief in social transformation.

These pre-war conditions opened a path for Yugoslav Communists to become a central political force that began organising the antifascist struggle throughout Yugoslavia soon after the fascist occupation.³⁶ Communist parties were central agents in liberation fronts that united all antifascist organisations, but as I will show below the communist organisations themselves went through a major transformation: both opening up and democratising from below. By the end of the war, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia counted more than 140,000 members most of whom came from the rural countryside and who were deeply engaged in the Partisan struggle.

1.2 World War II: Fascist occupation and the Partisan uprising

The invasion of Yugoslavia began on 6 April 1941 and was completed by 17 April 1941, when the Yugoslav Royal Army declared an unconditional surrender with very little resistance and even voluntary disarmament by its forces. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a semi-fascist dictatorship, was substituted by a thoroughly fascist one imposed by foreign rule. Yugoslavia was divided into different zones of occupation – Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and German occupation zones and protectorates. The central part with Croatia and most of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina was handed over to the political administration of Ustashas who formed a fascist puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945). Under these circumstances, a part of the old political elite openly collaborated with the fascist regime, while a part of the political elite, along with the royal family, migrated to London. The latter remained the internationally recognised Yugoslav government-in-exile, while in practical terms the royal Yugoslav government-­in-exile gradually lost popular support and had little ideological legitimacy in occupied Yugoslavia. From the very start of the war, the civilian population was exposed to brutal terror due to racial laws and decrees: forced labour and migration, torture and extermination became normal under the new occupation regimes and their racist policies. The network of concentration camps, including on Yugoslav territory, were horrific sites of mass killings, where hundreds of thousands of Roma, homosexuals, political opponents, antifascists, communist youth, women, Partisans, Jews and other nationalities and minorities were killed.³⁷This situation of extreme terror in the occupied zones led a massive number of people to participate in the Partisan antifascist struggle, which offered not only a place of refuge/survival, but imagined and finally promised and realised an imaginary of a different world.

To be sure, at the very beginning of the war, it was not crystal clear who was fighting against the occupation regime and for what. There were different self-proclaimed “patriotic” groups, who were not Partisan and who formed their own military units and militias in order to guard the homeland. Firstly, there were nationalistic Serbian units called Chetniks, led by Draža Mihailović, who became the recognised representative of the royal power of the Yugoslav government-­in-exile. At the very start of the war, Chetniks retained a degree of autonomy and fought on some occasions against the Nazi occupiers. They also received, up until mid-1943, great amounts of material assistance from the British forces, while as early as from the autumn 1941 they began to openly attack antifascist Partisan forces and collaborate with Nazi forces. This is well documented in transcriptions/archives and in their direct military engagement on the terrain.³⁸ Apart from their policies of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they fought together with the Nazis and Croatian Ustasha in major offensives against Partisan forces in 1943.³⁹ All across Yugoslavia fascist local collaborators started organising against the Partisans. In Slovenia, the local anti-communist militia mobilised clerical-fascist youth and part of the peasantry to join the White Guard,⁴⁰ who collaborated with Italian fascists. After the capitulation of Italy in 1943 and the heavy defeats that the Partisans inflicted, local collaborationists regrouped and were renamed the Home Guard.⁴¹ The latter came directly under Nazi command and swore oaths to Hitler on various occasions. In Kosovo and Macedonia, SS-­Albanian units, Skander-beg, operated, whereas the bourgeois nationalist Albanian units of Balli Kombëtar remained in a more ambivalent position. However, in the end they collaborated with Nazis and Chetniks in order for Kosovo to remain without Partisan resistance.⁴² In Bosnia a Muslim Handžar SS division was integrated into military actions of the Nazi army.

Local fascist collaborationists consisted of extreme nationalists who were ostracised in the pre-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia, while much of their leadership came from the old ruling class. With forced conscription in many rural areas, a lot of young peasants also entered the collaborationist forces. The intensity of civil war can be partially explained by the pre-war political antagonisms and ethnic hatred that resulted from the national question’s suppression. Civil war meant that people fought against people from the same regions, villages and sometimes even families, which testified to the intense ethical and political challenges (over belonging). Fascist terror led to a significant number of civilian deaths and military casualties in Yugoslavia. All in all, more than 10% of the entire population was lost during the war.⁴³ If we add to this the imprisonment, torturing and raping of the local population – we can get a picture of the extreme proportions of devastation. Above all, the local fascist collaborators were ethnically exclusive in terms of their membership and operated on one central principle: ethnic hatred. However, from the very start of the war, alleged patriotism was already morally problematic: on the one hand, this was displayed in the murder of their ‘own’ people who did not obey them, or who were ‘racially’ different, while, on the other, they were in service to their real masters – the fascist occupiers.

One should not forget that if it is true that the Partisan resistance in Yugoslavia was the biggest in occupied Europe and by the autumn of 1944 already counted around 650,000 Partisans, the fascist-collaborationist forces were among the strongest in Europe as well: in the autumn of 1944 they amounted to more than 250,000 people.⁴⁴ Admittedly, a portion of the local population was forcefully mobilised, however, that does not overshadow the historical fact that in many parts of Yugoslavia, fierce battles raged between Partisans and local collaborationists. In this respect Hannah Arendt was not only right when she spoke of the “banality of evil” (1977), of all those who facilitated deportations of Jews to concentration camps and in so doing were accomplices who greased the gears of the fascist state – this was also true of all those military and political units that actively supported the fascist regime – without which it would not have been able to sustain itself for so long. These were years of a strong international solidarity among fascists across Europe and the world.

In contrast to moral pragmatism and the principle of ethnic hatred, the Partisan liberation struggle represented the only political force that was open to all nations and nationalities, to men and women. The Partisans were thus the only ‘Yugoslav’ and gender-mixed armed group that operated in the whole of Yugoslavia. Moreover, the Yugoslav Partisans operated and cooperated beyond the ‘ethnic’ borders aiding in the formation of other Partisan detachments.⁴⁵ Late in 1943, detachments of the Italian Army that had resisted serving the Nazis switched sides and became involved in ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The “Primitive Accumulation” of Revisionist Memory: A Plea for the Partisan Counter-Archive
• Chapter 1 The Three Impossibilities of the Partisan Counter-Archive: Politics, Art and the ­‘Anti-memory’ of Rupture
• Chapter 2 Early Partisan Photography, Film and Poetry (1941–1945): An Oath to Past and Future Struggles
• Chapter 3 Continuing the Partisan Rupture by Other Means: From Black Wave Films to Late Modernist Monuments to Revolution (1960s–70s)
• Chapter 4 Undoing the Partisan Counter-Archive? From Nationalist(ic) Reconciliation to the Rehabilitation of Fascism
• Conclusion: Retrieving the Counter-Archive Beyond Yugoslavia
• Afterword Concrete utopia lasts forever – Branko Miljković’s Yugoslavia
• Bibliography
• Index