Media memorial discourses and memory struggles in Slovenia: Transforming memories of the Second World War and Yugoslavia

Contextual frames of shaping Slovenia’s collective memory

The relationship between national identity and collective memory is of crucial importance in societies that have recently experienced political instability, and that seek to consolidate their new democratic order and new political formation (Sierp, 2014). Due to significant social, political and economic transformations in the new Slovenian state after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the need to influence and change collective memory in order to understand and remember the past according to the new situation appeared. It was predominantly propelled by the political parties that started aggressively exploiting the media space to gain votes on the basis of the understanding of the Second World War (WWII) and the Yugoslav past. The right-oriented parties took an anti-Yugoslav and anti-Partisan position deeming the antifascist resistance to be irrelevant while the mainstream left-oriented parties sympathised with the antifascist Partisan movement and Yugoslav past.

The basic question of this article is, therefore, how the media in Slovenia became involved in cultural battles to define the past, and how media memorial discourses about WWII and Yugoslavia that bring a revisionist narrative in the public realm added fuel to memory struggles. With the case of Delo, the major mainstream Slovenian daily broadsheet newspaper, I investigate how the Partisan movement and WWII, which once served as an ideal of ethnic synergy and as a symbol of a just socialist Yugoslav state, has been reinterpreted to serve as a signifier of the undemocratic past through which Slovenia attempts to differentiate itself from the Yugoslav past and the Balkans. The researching of the emerging historical revisionisms and memorial discourses is relevant for a better understanding of how our identities are being constructed, for identifying the mechanisms and contents that feed the nationalisms, and for revealing how European contemporary reality is being built upon discourses that help restoring capitalism by denying legitimacy (or even past existence) of other socio-political orders such as socialism.

‘Slovenia must not tolerate the symbols of the former totalitarian system’, read the main headline in the Slovenian daily tabloid Slovenske novice (TL, 2012), a few days before the celebration of the national memorial day to commemorate the 21st anniversary of Slovenian independence on 25 June 2012. The then conservative government neglected to invite to the celebration those organisations whose banners and flags carry the red star, the symbol of Yugoslavia and the Partisans in WWII. Fierce debates flooded Slovenia: while some welcomed the decision that raising the flag on 25 June 1991 was a gesture that symbolised Slovenian independence and a break with the previous communist Yugoslav regime, others were deeply offended and argued that Partisan resistance to occupational forces represents the basis of the present democratic Slovenian society. The commemorative celebration aroused dilemmas about the past, and the two competing narratives that appeared in public space provided two opposite views on WWII and post-war history.

In the dominant ideologies of the post-socialist transition times in Slovenia, references to the history of WWII are articulated to signify the differences between the official nominal left and right parties (Kosi, 2012). Christian Karner and Bram Mertens (2013: 2) argue that WWII is a prominent point of reference not only across Europe but also across the political spectrum, ‘while the Left and Right of course differ enormously in their respective motivations for invoking World War II […] they appear to share […] a basic consciousness of the enduring legacies, relevance, and trauma’. According to Gal Kirn (2014a, 2014b), this dominant political and ideological opposition in Slovenia creates a binary opposition between discourses of national reconciliation (politics of social democrats) and discourses of rehabilitation of local fascism (politics of conservatives) regarding the civil war during WWII between the Partisans and domestic collaborators. This becomes the driving force of memory struggles.

These two dominant oppositional forces, which also prevail in the media and public spheres, have in recent years been accompanied by a third resistant force based on an open affirmation of the Yugoslav and Partisan past. By this, I mean not only the Association of Combatants for the Values of the National Liberation Front, which, in the crossfire of two dominant political discourses, has adopted a rather defensive position and accepted the necessity of national reconciliation (cf. Kirn, 2014b: 329–332) but rather leftist discourses with strong political dimensions (Močnik, 1999: 174): the new left political party United Left since 2014, the cultural institute Novi Kombinat and the female choir Kombinat, as well as academic institutions and theorists (e.g. the Institute for Labour Studies, the Workers and Punks’ University, the youth organisation Iskra). Their contribution to memory struggles in Slovenia can be described with Kirn’s (2014b: 37) conceptualisation of the theoretical and political-activist aim of his book, which is ‘de-forgetting the revolution’. This resistant discourse is currently marginal, but is slowly growing.

The Republic of Slovenia, a member of the European Union (EU) since 2004, is historically closely connected with the Balkans. After the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovenia became a part of the confederate State of Slovenians, Croats and Serbs in October 1918 and in December 1918 merged with the Kingdom of Serbia into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians. In 1929, it was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which in its latter years turned into a semi-fascist autocratic state system with many social contradictions (Centrih, 2011: 112–137). After WWII, the new socialist state of Yugoslavia was formed. Dennison Rusinow (2008; cf. Kirn, 2014a) shows that the growth of nationalisms throughout the country, which resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia, were products of long-term crisis situations, which started in the late 1960s with political frustrations and growing economic strains, which also opened the gate to neoliberal discourses after Tito’s death. All this resulted in the flourishing of ethnic nationalisms in the 1980s and the hegemonic dominance of nationalism and liberalism led to the collapse of Yugoslavia (Jović, 2009: 13–40). In 1991, Slovenia became independent.

Boris Buden (2014) observes the growth of revisionist discourses in accordance with nationalist projects in all post-Yugoslav countries, and defines them as the products of transitologist ideologies, which insist on the smoother transition to corporate capitalism. Tea Sindbaek (2009) notes that the communist Partisans’ national liberation fight against the Axis occupiers was the founding myth of a socialist, multicultural and multi-ethnic state Yugoslavia. Kirn (2010: 207–208), Dejan Jović (2009: 54) and Darko Suvin (2014: 314–318) even show that Partisan politics had huge material consequences for the formation of the ‘new Yugoslavia as a revolutionary political form’, which arose during WWII and radically broke with the old social conditions in the pre-war monarchic Yugoslavia. The dominant narrative about WWII in Yugoslavia intersected with the idolatry of the communist revolution and party principles; after the war, Partisans became national heroes, and there was a broad cross-national consensus in Yugoslavia that this was the basis of the common Yugoslav identity, at least until Tito’s death in 1980.

In independent Slovenia, such interpretations regarding the Partisans, the communist revolution and Yugoslav connectedness, which had dominated in Yugoslavia, were not suitable. The Yugoslav grand narratives of Partisan struggle were in conflict with the Slovenian processes of nation-building and its European democratic orientation, which resulted in a broad public attempt to influence collective memory and to translate the previous dominant narrative into a revisionist narrative of a repressive and totalitarian communist state. To borrow Rastko Močnik’s (1999) theoretical apparatus, different contemporary interpretations of WWII in Slovenia strive to fill the void of the meaning of the Slovenian Nation, which is now an empty space. Lev Centrih (2011: 29–30) upgrades Močnik’s idea and shows that the concept of the Nation was in the past filled with the meanings of class struggle, the antifascist liberation struggle and socialist revolution, but in the new Slovenia the Nation is without historical content. The Slovenian Nation as a mythical entity and as an empty signifier serves as an excellent ground for the revisionist interpretations of the past.

Following Jeffrey Olick (1999), I can identify three different phases of the memory of WWII across different historical eras in Slovenia and corresponding discourses that struggle to occupy the hegemonic position in the interpretation of the past. These are as follows: (a) a unified and stable collective memory of WWII in Tito’s Yugoslavia until 1980, (b) the period of its destabilisation from the compromised late socialism in the 1980s and from Slovenia’s independence after 1991 and (c) the period of the strengthening of the revisionist discourses after Slovenia’s joining of the EU. Memory struggles that appear across a broad range of the social realm in Slovenia should be understood in the broader European and post-Yugoslav milieu of post-Cold War historical revisionism. Jan-Werner Müller (2002: 9) argues that as memories of WWII were unfrozen throughout Europe, but ‘in Central and Eastern Europe, memory has of course also returned, with a vengeance that the West has been spared’. This includes nation-building processes, for which memories have been mobilised, and a distant past invented. In Eastern European post-communist countries, processes of historical revisionism are closely connected to nation-building questions, because the communist project overwhelmed the national question, as Cristian Tileagă (2012) shows for the contemporary Romanian historical revisionism, which redefines communism as the Other, alien to national identity and national interest. In this regard, Slovenia is not much different from other post-socialist countries since in all of them, structures of collective memories were nationalised.

In this way, Aline Sierp (2014: 148) explains that changes in domestic policy due to transformations of the political system and changes in the international environment due mainly to the creation of the EU and the events surrounding the end of the Cold War ‘have influenced public policies of official remembrance’. According to Močnik (1999: 153–161, 182–183), the national politics of remembering in Slovenia should be put in the broader context of the subjugation of Slovenia to the global order and should be rethought in the Balkan–Europe dichotomy, when constructing the Balkans as ‘the other side of Europe’ and as the opposition of ‘we’, or as the opposition between barbarity, backwardness and socialism versus civilisation, democracy and capitalist free markets. This also constructs Europe vertically in relation to the Balkans, but in the eyes of Europe Slovenians are Balkans. Močnik (1999: 150) argues, that the Balkans are a constitutive part of the imaginary of Europe, and Slovenians act humble and subservient to Europe so as to become a part of it and to distance themselves from the Balkans. In this sense, the common Yugoslav history also has to be erased and reinterpreted in accordance with the myths of European Slovenia as a democratic, modern country and of the Yugoslav Balkans as a primitive, undemocratic Other.

Over the 25 years of the independent Slovenian state, in public discourses, from media texts, other popular cultural representations, history school textbooks to political debates, competing narratives have appeared, which are fighting for supremacy in memory struggles to rewrite the national history. Memory struggles are nested in the dominant ideologies’ binarism of the transition times in Slovenia, to follow Kirn (2014a: 2–3), which on one hand, nostalgically praise and glorify the good old days, and on the other, demonise everything that is associated with the Partisan movement, socialism, Tito and Yugoslavia. Moreover, when the memory struggles were strengthened with the European political intervention after 2004 in Slovenia, also material commemorative sites have been transformed, such as monuments, statues and memorials (cf. Kirn, 2012, 2014b). Forgetting Yugoslavia, the Partisan movement and remembering the pre-communist and post-communist past has become of crucial importance in the reconstruction of the Slovenian national identity. Maurice Halbwachs (2001: 89) once stated that such illusions enable people to move from one stage to another without even noticing that their collective memory is ruptured.

Memory as a dialogue with the past: about theories and methods

The uniqueness of memory is in its characteristic that it is a kind of dialogue with the past. The basic theoretical line of this article results from Olick’s (1999: 381) dialogical approach to memory, which presupposes that commemorative images of the past reflect both the past and contemporary circumstances, but moreover, they are also ‘path-dependent products’ of earlier commemorative images as well.

Mapped to the case of Delo’s images of WWII and socialist Yugoslavia as commemorations of the recent past, I am mainly interested in how different contextual factors shape media images, but I will also shed light on the history and development of these media commemorative images. Studying the changing interactions between the past and the present, I will focus on these images’ ability to constrain the availability of discourses regarding memory in Slovenia. According to Olick and Levy (1997: 921–922), images of the past can have certain cultural constraints, ‘those which operate mythically (often associated with the power of the past over the present), and those which operate instrumentally (often associated with the power of the present over the past)’. Collective memory is subjected to the dialectics between remembering and forgetting and, as such, it is a space of discursive struggles.

Moreover, memory is always also mediated. Shared views of the past are nowadays produced by a wide variety of media, which work together to shape and disseminate narratives, and hence to produce particular memory sites as common points of reference (Hoskins, 2004). Media discourse as an elite discourse, to borrow from Teun Van Dijk (1993: 8), together with other elite discourses, such as political, corporate, educational and scientific, play an important role in modern societies in constructing the national community and its knowledge about the past (cf. Sturken, 1997; Zelizer, 1998). In order to examine how media texts are involved in memory struggles, Michel Foucault (1982: 183–184) warns that it is necessary to observe how knowledge of the past is chosen, how it is narrated, who is the narrator, which discourses guide the narration and what present interests are behind this version of the past.

In the methodological sense, this article tries to trace changes in media reporting on two themes through the three periods of stable discourse of the 1970s, of its destabilisation in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the period of strengthening of revisionist discourse after 2004. The first theme is the WWII partisan movement and the second is the socialist Yugoslavia. The main focus of the analysis is on the articles, covering themes of WWII, the National Liberation Front, the Partisan movement, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and communism, published in the recent period between 1 January 2005 and 1 August 2012. Half a year after joining the EU on 1 May 2004, the European discourses became a part of everyday reality and were materialised in people’s hopes of economic and social prosperity, based on new capitalist ideology, which contrasted the socialist one. The corpus of Delo’s articles from this period that I reviewed comprised 288 newspaper articles about the Partisans and 33 articles about Yugoslavia. ¹ However, to provide the diachronic perspective of Delo’s representations through time and to determine how earlier images affect and constrain the present ones, the analysis includes also articles from two distinctive periods of Yugoslavia. The first period of the 1970s can be described as the golden period of Yugoslavia with its growing international influence resulting in the final establishing of the border with Italy and the leading role among the Non-Aligned countries. I analysed 234 Delo’s articles on Tito, WWII, Partisans and Communist party from 1975 to prove the stability of the Yugoslav discourse after WWII. After Tito’s death in 1980, the power struggles were slowly gaining shape and exploded in the late 1980s following the economic crisis and growing nationalisms which resulted in Yugoslav wars and its breakup. I analysed 325 Delo’s articles on Tito, Communism, WWII and Partisans from 1989 to 1996 to observe the destabilisation of the Yugoslav discourse and the emergence of revisionist ones.

I chose Delo because it has one of the highest readerships in Slovenia, it is renowned for the high quality of its news and it is one of the oldest national daily newspapers in Slovenia. ² In May 1959, the first issue of Delo was released, when two newspapers Slovenski poročevalec, the official newspaper of the National Liberation Front during WWII, and Ljudska pravica, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Slovenia, merged. Among the reasons to select Delo was, therefore, also its explicit Partisan and communist legacy through its forerunners.

I am interested in analysing memory struggles in Slovenia from the perspective of the organisation of media narratives and of the principal laws of Delo’s memorialisation of WWII and Yugoslavia. With a critical narrative analysis of selected newspaper articles, I concentrate on abstract and general forms of these representations, which typically shape all specific narratives about WWII or Yugoslavia. ‘A generalized narrative form may underlie a range of narratives in a cultural tradition’, James Wertsch (2008: 123) notes, which means, ‘that the focus in analysing the narrative organisation of collective memory changes from a list of specific narratives to an underlying pattern that is instantiated by each of several specific narratives’. In developing this line, my purpose is to discover the generalised schematic narrative templates that underlie the ruptures of Delo’s discourses about WWII and Yugoslavia over time and their mythical effects.

Remembering the Partisans and Yugoslavia: the cultural-historical background

To understand the present dilemmas about the recent past in Slovenia, it is necessary to offer an explanation of the historical connections between Yugoslavia, the Partisans and the communist revolution. On 6 April 1941, when occupation forces invaded Yugoslavia, Slovenia was a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Slovenian territory was split: Germany occupied the northern, eastern and some central parts of Slovenia; Italy occupied the southern, western and central parts with the capital Ljubljana; and Hungary occupied the eastern parts of Slovenia.

Soon after, on 27 April 1941, four groups (the Communist Party of Slovenia as the leading founder, the Christian Socialists, the Sokol gymnastic movement and the Cultural Society) established the National Liberation Front in order to start an organised armed resistance against the occupiers. Their charter and adopted laws show that the Liberation Front had the primary goal of armed resistance against occupying armies but it also had a secondary goal of communist revolution (Centrih, 2011: 137, 187; Repe, 2007). Miklavž Komelj (2009) and Jović (2009: 57) add that this is a specific feature of the Yugoslav Partisan movement in comparison to the armies of Western bourgeois countries, which only tried to defend their socio-political order from Fascism and Nazism. In comparison, the Partisans not only resisted but also exploited the anti-Fascist resistance to change the pre-war capitalist monarchic socio-political order of Yugoslavia and its class system. The resistance against the Fascism and Nazism, and against the old socio-political order both led to the socialist revolution and the constitution of a new, classless, socialist Yugoslavia. The Communist Party, which was founded as an opposition party in 1919, remained illegal from 1921 until WWII and, since it had significant experience with underground operations, it easily organised the massive guerrilla Partisan warfare at the beginning of the war.

All Yugoslav Partisans, amounting to around 800,000 combatants at the end of the war (Kirn, 2010: 207) and representing the largest resistance army in Western and Central Europe, were led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who had also been the Communist Party leader since 1937. The extent of war crimes committed by Nazi and Fascist troops during WWII in Slovenia is estimated to be around 30,000 victims, who were either killed or declared missing, and another 11,000 Slovenians who were mobilised in the occupying armies (Šorn et al., 2002).

From the beginning and throughout the war, there were also serious conflicts between the Partisans and counterrevolutionary organisations, whose members collaborated with the German and Italian armies and who were the advocates of the monarchic regime of the pre-war Yugoslavia. In the spring of 1942, village guards were established and gained a strong support from the occupying Italian army. This further strengthened the hostilities of the Partisans towards these groups, but in 1943 when Italy surrendered to the Allies and the village guards numbered approximately 6000 members, leaders of the National Liberation Front issued the command that various groups of village guards, blue guards (Chetniks) and white guards (Nazi sympathisers) should be disarmed, only their leaders imprisoned, while their members invited to join the Partisans. Many of them indeed joined the Liberation Front, but a great majority joined the Home Guard legion, which was established in September 1943 by the German administration in Slovenia. This act also officially started the civil war between the Partisans and Home Guard in Slovenia (Lešnik and Tomc, 1995). Meanwhile, Yugoslavia was constituted on 29 November 1943 by the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance movement.

The Home Guards sympathised with the German Nazi occupiers (they even swore allegiance to Hitler in a group oath in 1944), but they were connected among themselves primarily on the basis of the battle against communist revolution. Centrih (2011: 324) shows that different anti-Partisan groups, as a Slovenian contra-revolution, had different political programmes: from the restoration of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the constitution of new united Europe under the hegemony of greater Germany as a defence against Bolshevism. After the surrender of Germany in May 1945, members of Home Guard squads fled to Italy and Austria; many of them managed to escape to different parts of the world and lived in the Slovenian Diaspora in the post-war period, but many (estimated at 11,000) surrendered or were captured by foreign liberation armies, who returned them as war prisoners to Yugoslavia. Immediately after the war, some of the nationalist militias and/or collaborationists, such as the Croatian Ustaši, the Serbian Chetniks and the Slovenian Home Guards, were prosecuted in court but most of them were killed without trial. The post-war killings after WWII were a punishment for collaboration with foreign occupiers and not a systematic act of killing executed by the Communist Party.

However, the legacy of the Home Guards was controversial during the socialist era: the topic was rigorously silenced, and in people’s perceptions the Home Guard served as a prototype of the worst national traitor. People who were associated with Home Guards were ashamed to discuss this topic and they hid their past. They also faced problems in their lives and in the public realm, which were guided by the hidden power mechanisms of the socialist state, such as different administrative barriers and difficulties in accessing jobs, and so on. Kirn (2014b: 329) adds that this is a blind spot of Yugoslavia since the communist leadership never properly addressed these issues.

On the other side, Josip Broz Tito and the Partisans emerged from the war as national heroes and became the promoters of socialism. Accordingly, Partisan resistance to occupation became the dominant signifier of the past, which silenced all other narratives and coordinated collective memory in Yugoslavia. Partisan politics with libertarian and emancipatory power also crucially affected the direction of the later social development of Yugoslavia, such as the shaping of the self-management system as a replacement for the state, reformation of the communist movement through the critique of Stalin and the formation of the Non-Aligned movement as the critique of the then existing world order (Jović, 2009: 3; Kirn, 2010; Suvin, 2014: 318). Moreover, the slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’ became a national slogan, a constitutive concept and the first political principle in Yugoslavia in the times of early party-state socialism (Jović, 2009: 54–61; Suvin, 2014: 61–67).

Yugoslavia was never occupied by the Soviet army, as most of the Eastern European countries were. Yugoslav socialism was markedly distinct in comparison to other socialist regimes; as Eric Hobsbawm (2004: 302) suggests, Yugoslavia was ‘a somewhat eccentric member of the family of socialist systems’. The 1960s introduced a decentralised political system, and Yugoslavia had developed open relations with the western capitalist world. Rusinow (2008) talks about the ‘supermarket revolution’ in 1969 and shows that Tito’s Yugoslavia, which, combining one-party rule with an economic system of workers’ self-management, aroused intense interests in the West already in the times of the Cold War (pp. 26–41). However, we should point out, as Suvin (2014: 238–240; Kirn, 2014a: 351–356; cf. Rusinow, 2008) emphasises, that precisely this ‘market socialism’ from the 1960s was an early forecaster of the fall of Yugoslavia, when the first crisis moments appeared based on the linking of non-communist/capitalist and openly nationalist elements (e.g. the Croatian uprising in 1971).

Moreover, the Yugoslav example with egalitarian state socialism also challenges the totalitarian paradigm. Immediately after the war, a Soviet-type administrative socialism was introduced, but in 1948, due to the conflict between Tito and Stalin, Yugoslavia distanced itself from the Stalinist ‘parasitic and stagnation monopolism’ (Suvin, 2014: 227) and was expelled from the Eastern bloc; Yugoslav communists built a new political-economic model (Centrih, 2011: 61). Although the terrors and cruelty of the Stalinist methods developed in Yugoslavia in its early stage cannot be denied, it should be acknowledged that Tito’s break with Stalin represents the roots of Yugoslavia’s peculiar ‘transition from a totalitarian to an authoritarian system’ (Lešnik, 1998: 287). Even Hannah Arendt (2003) explicitly argues that Tito’s Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian regime (cf. Kirn, 2014a: 26).

Erasing Partisan memories: redefining WWII and criminalising the Partisan movement

In the 1970s, media representations of Partisan movement were faithful to the common Partisan images of the post-WWII Yugoslavia but in the late 1980s these positive images were gradually challenged by revisionist discourses, which were further strengthened in the mid-2000s. Memory struggles in Slovenia fed by media reinterpretations of history started to be drawn along two lines. First, there was a redefinition of the role of the antifascist National Liberation Front in WWII and the role of the collaborating Home Guards, described in this chapter. Second, there was an aggressive reinterpretation of the Yugoslav socialist period as a highly totalitarian communist regime, connected with the legacy of the communist Partisans, which is addressed in the next chapter. Both media revisionist discourses are closely connected and can be separated only for analytical reasons.

Recent opinion polls in Slovenia show that there have been slight changes in the memories and perceptions of the past among Slovenian people, although the survey proves that the positive evaluation of the Partisans remains stronger than that of the Home Guards (Toš, 2012). However, over the years, the percentage of the positive evaluation of the Home Guards has been increasing. Moreover, the results testify that from year to year people know less about the history of WWII, but know much more about the ancient (e.g. myths of origin of the Slovenian ethnic body in the times of the state formation of Carantania from the seventh to tenth centuries) and the recent (after Slovenian independence in 1991) history of Slovenia (Toš, 2012).

Historical revisionisms, as observed by Kirn (2014a: 24–26), have been present in public discourses throughout all post-Yugoslav nation-states since the mid-1980s and strengthened with the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The media have played an important role in bringing the competing narrative to the once dominant narrative about WWII in public in Slovenia from the late 1980s. This coincides with the emergence of national reconciliation discourses from intellectual and political sources in Slovenia in the mid-1980s and is connected with the work of the intellectual Spomenka Hribar, who published her essays about the post-war killings in 1987. From the end of WWII onwards, these killings were totally absent from the media but then they were suddenly brought into speech.

In the period between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, newspaper articles on the topic of the post-war killings of the captured collaborating military groups by the Soviet Red Army and the newly constituted Yugoslav army, which grew out of the Partisan movement, appeared for the first time in Delo and soon after their number increased remarkably. For instance, there were 371 articles (including 179 readers’ letters) on the topic of post-war killings from 1989 to 2000 (63 in 1990 alone). This surely testifies to the thesis that the revisionist interpretations started entering public space in Slovenia from the late 1980s onwards.

In that time, the articles began to talk about ‘the disclosure of post-war slaughters’ (Zagorski, 1991), or about communist leaders who ‘have caused significant damage and more victims among the Slovenian nation than two of the occupiers, Nazism and Fascism, did together’ (Levstik, 1992). Delo explicitly started to talk about national reconciliation and to rehabilitate and praise the Home Guard movement, and the new narrative template promoted national reconciliation as a Slovenian national policy. The articles started looking for the responsible agents of the post-war killings and ended up with a defined group of culprits. Some articles claimed that the leadership of the Yugoslav Army decided about post-war killings (Vasle, 1992), while the others stated it was Josip Broz Tito himself who ordered it (Guzelj, 1993). Others claimed that the post-war Slovenian communist political leaders were involved (Biščak, 1992) and were working hand-in-hand with the communist secret service (STA, 1994), while some of the articles played with a rather unlikely idea that the present left-oriented politicians (pejoratively called ‘forces of communist continuity’) were responsible for the killings that occurred half a century ago (Albreht, 1996). Many analysed articles indicate the emergence of a narrative template that is based on the equating of communist politics and the Partisan movement and on the denigration of the antifascist struggle and socialist Yugoslavia due to communist political crimes. A new vocabulary entered media discourse about Partisans and Yugoslavia, such as Partisans/Communists as ‘slaughters’, ‘cleansing’ and Home Guards as ‘victims’, which formed very melodramatic, spectacular and moralising frames of narrative templates.

It appears as if the silenced topic of the post-war killings which started circulating in the late 1980s and in the 1990s strongly disturbed people’s perception of the past, causing the public to doubt the whole history of WWII and after. Due to the growing ambiguity about the WWII history and the role of Partisans in it, it became much ‘safer’ for people not to talk about it at all to avoid any possible conflicts. The previous images of the heroic WWII efforts started to be silenced in the media and were more and more substituted by the fraction of the WWII history (post-war killings).

On such a basis, a revisionist news discourse developed further in the following decades. This trend was further strengthened after 2000s when the legitimacy of the revisionist media discourse was proven also by material evidence (e.g. the uncovering of mass graves). In the media, the previous silence of the post-war killings was represented as a lie and if this was a lie, everything else about WWII could be brought into question. Ironically, the only material and recent evidence people could trust about WWII were the uncovered mass graves. The ‘other’ WWII history started disappearing from public discourses (history-teaching in schools, politics, commemorations and also media) making people forget the important details about it.

Delo’s articles between 2005 and 2012 prove that the most common representation of the National Liberation Front in Delo is connected to the distinction between Partisans and Home Guards, while the distinction between the Partisans and occupying foreign forces is pushed into the background. The narrative template is based on the privileging of the civil war.

The great majority of Delo’s articles about WWII of the period talk about killed Home Guards, the discovery of mass burial sites and national reconciliation in a melodramatic and sensationalistic way. The narrative template that most often describes specific narratives about WWII is reduced to a generalised function of the villains (Partisans) and the victims (Home Guards). Such a narrative template rests on a story about Partisans who killed people en masse during and after WWII. For instance, ‘This report [about post-war killings] is a contribution to continuing the dialogue about overcoming the burdens of the totalitarian regimes’ (Albreht, 2008b: 4). The articles started reporting personal stories of the victims and were looking for witnesses to substantiate the evidence (Grča, 2008: 4). Due to many identified mass graves of various collaborating armies, one article even stated that Slovenia is ‘the largest post-war scaffold’ and speculated that there were at least 100,000 people killed after the war (Žibert, 2008). Most of the articles emphasised that the communist regime had been concealing not only the killings but also the suffering of the people who lost their relatives and friends (Albreht, 2007: 2). The killed ones were stripped of their fascist collaboration and their military role during WWII and were represented as merely suffering civilian victims. The media started looking for the ‘new’ victims of war violence, and in this process the Partisan resistance against Italian and German occupiers was transformed into aggression against ordinary people (Albreht, 2008a). In many cases forgiveness, tolerance and national reconciliation were emphasised (Žabkar, 2008), but only as far as the collaborating agents were involved. As soon as Partisans were in question, no options for forgiveness or tolerance were given. They were represented merely as aggressors. Such narrative template blurs the lines between Stalinist methods and post-war killings in Slovenia, and as a result subjects all Partisan action (during and after the war) to the interpretation of communist repression. Post-war killings ‘were now interpreted as acts of revenge and revolutionary terror on the part of communists and Partisans’ (Kirn, 2014b: 328). The phrase ‘totalitarian regime’ is used as a synonym for the Partisans and communist Yugoslavia. Such images of WWII revive the spontaneous ideologies of anti-communism while simultaneously increasing the division and hatred between people.

The variety of other topics connected with WWII are either ignored or are presented in a context of the narrative template of civil war, in which all specific events and actors meet the criteria of a generalised function of this abstract schematic narrative. On an implicit level, everything is relativised and all the victims of WWII suddenly become equal. The victim discourse seizes readers’ perceptions in such a way as to feel sympathy and to have the same emotions for all killed during or after WWII, regardless on which side they fought. Such examples provide readers with specific images to sympathise with both fighting sides and to distort the role of both in WWII. The meaning of the whole of WWII is inverted to the problem of the existence of the war violence, in general, and ignores the initial responsibility for it. In this manoeuvre, only the Partisans and the Liberation Front, equated with the Communist Party, are persistently represented on the implicit level as the perpetrators of all human rights violations during and after the war.

Such a general narrative template obscures the historical complexities and, although specific narratives omit many facts about historical events or periods (even in the most general sense of what WWII was about, that is, who fought against whom and for what reason), this is not disturbing for the readers because the flowing narrative structure of these decontextualised stories keeps readers engrossed in the story about the Partisans and their Home Guard victims and makes other historical facts unnoticeable and unimportant. Inside Delo’s general narrative frame, the broader context of WWII as a total war and the Nazi crimes are not mentioned at all. There are plenty of specific narratives of the killed Home Guards while their collaboration with the Nazis is conveniently ignored. There are almost no voices published that could answer unpleasant questions about the collaboration.

The analysis of the language chosen, the use of words and the denomination of various groups of soldiers in WWII show that those who were killed by Partisans are persistently referred to as ‘civilians’ or ‘victims’; in some cases, it is not even clearly indicated that they were Home Guards or other individuals or organised groups of civilians who collaborated with the German army and worked against the Partisans. In many cases, they are denominated as ‘victims of war crimes’ or ‘victims of Partisans’ or ‘victims of Communists’. The Partisans, in contrast, are in many cases discredited at a verbal level as they are dehumanised and demonised; the repeating of words such as ‘Partisan slaughterers’, ‘war criminals’, ‘communist revolutionaries’, even ‘murderers’ ascribes collective guilt to one side only. In such a narrative schematic template, the entire Partisan movement is effectively criminalised precisely because it is left undiscussed, and it is represented only in the context of a communist regime as oppressive and criminal. Forgotten is the fact that Partisans were officially recognised as the sole antifascist organisation in Yugoslavia by the allied leaders (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) at the Teheran conference in 1943. In such a general narrative template, the Partisans as communists are equated with the Nazi regime and treated at the same level as Nazis. The effect of such narrative techniques of blurring different sides is that not the Nazi regime but the communist regime is presented as the main villain of the WWII.

This general narrative template attempts to turn the focus of responsibility away from Nazi collaborators, who are represented as victims of either Partisan, Communist or even of Nazi leaders and never as aggressors. To borrow from Komelj (2012), I can argue that in Delo’s discourse, the Partisan movement and Yugoslav socialism are emptied of meanings of revolutionary potential so that they can serve the mythological function of constructing the Slovenian nation-state and the purposes of covering local fascism.

However, such a struggle for the meaning and memory of WWII is a wider post-Yugoslav phenomenon. A number of similar cases exist in ex-Yugoslavia, which testify to the same problem: revisionist plans in Croatia to build a national memorial for the Ustaša and soldiers of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) killed by Partisans (Radonic, 2011), unsettled historical revisions in Serbia and Croatia regarding high levels of sympathy for Chetniks (the case of General Mihailović) and the Ustaša (General Pavelić) as antifascists (Mihajlović Trbovc and Pavasović Trošt, 2013), the ways in which Draža Mihailović and the Chetnik movement have been rehabilitated as Serbian national heroes (Sindbaek, 2009). Competing narratives with the criminalisation of the Partisan movement on one side and the celebration of collaboration as anti-communist national patriots on the other proves that memory is at the heart of issues about national self-determination. These memory tactics in post-Yugoslav countries are connected to mythmaking, which is inevitably a political process, and Müller (2002: 12) calls them ‘post-communist myths of national salvation’.

Changing the memories of Yugoslavia: totalitarising the whole Yugoslav socialist way of life

A diachronic analysis of the post-war images from the mid-1970s proves that Delo’s reports about Partisan movement and Yugoslav communist revolution were commonly published and were very positive; there were no representations expressing doubts about the National Liberation Front, the Partisans or Tito as the supreme commander of Yugoslavia. The narrative template pictured the National Liberation Front and communist revolution as liberating and as the highest values of the state. They were also humanised, created as the highest human good of socialist Yugoslavia through techniques of personalisation, providing the glorified personal characteristics of Tito and emphasising the human side of socialism as a system. The ultimate goodness of Tito was the norm in Delo’s reporting and even his facial features were prescribed to be read as kind, such as in the article ‘His face reflects a big human heart’ (Delo, 1975: 19). Tito was praised as ‘a great son of all our nations’ (Tanjug, 1975c: 3), and in Delo there was no place for any ambiguity. Such Delo’s narratives resembled the religious worshiping, although of a secular saint: ‘In a country whose successes, struggles and achievements are associated with Your revolutionary work, clairvoyance, spirit of freedom, humanity, sacrifice’ (Jasnič, 1975: 1).

The narrative template also mixed WWII with the then political, economic or cultural circumstances and linked the current economic successes with the Partisan past. The quality of life in socialist Yugoslavia was attributed to the merits and courage of ‘Tito’s fighters’ (Tanjug, 1975a: 4), as was the existence of Yugoslavia itself (Tanjug, 1975d). Many of the articles equated the communist revolution with the Partisan resistance in exclusively positive sense (Tanjug, 1975b). Such images of the past played an important role in the constitution of the Yugoslav state while constructing a solid, uniform and unambiguous collective memory of cross-national Partisan resistance.

Such a narrative template guided Delo’s reporting about WWII for several decades, but after Tito’s death and the decline of the Communist party’s strength, media reporting changed, which undoubtedly triggered the changes of collective memory. Tito was suddenly marked as ‘a complete absolutist’ and ‘a twisted metaphor’ (Jež, 1989: 2) and totalitarian discourse entered Delo’s reporting, for example, ‘For our totalitarianism they only invented a different, perhaps a little more pink disguise’ (Delo, 1989: 5). In the second half of the 1980s, images of bad Partisans and totalitarian Yugoslavia appeared, which previously did not exist at all. Suddenly, a new narrative template attacked the stability of the previously strong and unified collective memory and began to transform Slovenia’s collective memory. Such images in Delo were a response to the earlier dominant images as well as to the contemporary context of the late 1980s.

Moreover, Delo nowadays offers totally opposite images to what one could find in it 40 years ago. Dominant media images of WWII and socialist Yugoslavia changed. Struggles over the meaning and memory of the Partisans and socialist Yugoslavia in the present Slovenia are not just about communism, Partisans and Home Guards but are always about the adequacy of earlier collective memory, to paraphrase Olick (2005: 3).

Present dominant discourse in Delo’s articles about the former Yugoslavia is its representation as a totalitarian regime, with mostly negative aspects of Yugoslav socialism and Josip Broz Tito at the forefront. The articles featured calls for demystification of Tito, who is pictured as the untouchable tyrant father (Krbavčič, 2008). They called for the enlightened revision of history, and described the mainstream post-war history as a process of balkanisation (Čakš, 2005: 3). They called upon Slovenia to finally condemn totalitarian regimes but focused only on condemning Communism instead of Nazism and Fascism, equating Yugoslav communism with Stalinism (Mašanović, 2009: 7). After independence, there have been numerous debates on what to do with the roads, squares and towns, named after Tito, and Delo took a clearly negative stance, claiming in impatient tone: ‘Tito’s road certainly does not want to disappear from road signs’ (Petkovšek, 2011: 12). Many people, who did not conform to such revisionism were marked as indoctrinated, backward, Balkan communists, unable of seeing the romantically praised capitalism: ‘Unfortunately, his [Tito’s] ideological influence on individuals is still strong enough that it hinders the integration and success in free and bright present times of globalized capitalism’ (Čakš, 2005: 3). These cases clearly disclose the narrative template behind the reporting of Yugoslavia: it connects Yugoslav socialism with barbarity and totalitarianism, and position communism as oppressive agent against liberating capitalism. This creates binary oppositions between totalitarian, oppressive Yugoslavia and democratic, liberating Europe. Such images of the past transform collective memory in post-Yugoslav countries for the purposes of an easier transition to capitalism, as Buden (2014: 44) argues, when defining this orientalist view on post-Yugoslav countries’ own pasts as a deleting of one’s own democratic activities under the logic of the dominance of the capitalist West, whereby the agents of socialist democratic revolution and emancipatory past are treated as barbarian and undemocratic. Kirn (2014a: 23–26) considers this to be a form of auto-orientalism.

Although the selection of the analysed articles was unbiased since all the Delo’s contents on communism and socialist Yugoslavia between 2005 and 2012 were included in the analysis, Delo’s reporting in this period proved to be a strict restrictor to positive memories of socialist Yugoslavia. Due to positive view on the socialist period of at least half of the population, one would expect to hear also positive voices and to find images that depict the socialist period as a part of the evolution, leading to the current situation, but those are absent from Delo’s reporting. Delo’s narrative template namely constrains all discourses about memories of Yugoslavia that are not congruent with the now dominant anti-communist interpretation. They are in many cases silenced, marginalised or even publicly accused and are trapped in the spiral of silence in Slovenian society. Delo does not write about full employment, free social services accessible to all (the pension and the general health system), expansion of the education system, plebeian democracy in socialist Yugoslavia and, thus, totally suppresses these discourses about the past.

In this sense, the revisionist narrative template sets the Yugoslav socialist past in the context of the Balkans and signifies all existing contemporary positive memories of Yugoslavia as those that foster ‘the balkanisation of Slovenia’ and endanger the stability of the nation-state. Such media images of the past constantly negotiate with Slovenia’s present subordinate position in Europe. ‘Instances of ideal “I” are Europe, but in the eyes of Europe “we” are Balkan’ (Močnik, 1999: 181–183) and for this reason Delo constantly creates ‘Balkan’ as being in opposition with ‘we’. This ideological operation is used for the distancing from other post-Yugoslav countries, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and so on, to construct them as the other of ‘we’, as Balkan. Delo’s images of the Yugoslav past enthrone mythologies of the nation-state, create boundaries between countries and perpetuate hatred in the region while erasing all of Yugoslavia’s revolutionary potentials and the coexistence of diverse cultural traditions. Buden (2014) even argues that these transitologist reinterpretations of history took part in the emergence of bloody wars at the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

The most frequent mechanism of totalitarising the whole Yugoslav way of life is through highlighting the communist political crimes. By paraphrasing Marx’s parole, an article, for example, discredited communism as a threatening ‘spectre’ that would harm the people (Pengov Bitenc, 2012: 6). Writing about Yugoslavia is very often reduced to communist repression and the articles reminded people to ‘remember’ personal events of the politically oppressed people which were not a part of the public speech or collective memory, such as the political prison on the island Goli otok (Jenšterle, 2008: 19). All the people who were a part of the communist regime were marked as criminals, and in the articles it was possible to find calls for their prosecution: ‘Although there were already a few complaints about the condemnation of the totalitarian communist regime and its crimes, the regime that allowed all this in Slovenia has not yet been sentenced’ (Albreht, 2012: 2). These general narrative schemata emphasise the political repression of communist authorities and equates Tito’s Yugoslav communism with Stalinism. In the words of Suvin (2014), such a narrative template can be characterised as ‘the fourth Yugoslav uniqueness’ since such a politics of remembering reproduces hostile class-led mini-nationalist movements of all post-Yugoslav countries (p. 199).

Another characteristic of this narrative template is the traumatisation of Yugoslavia and its official ideologies of antifascism and brotherhood and unity. Post-socialist traumas regarding the communist past have been constructed as a result of revisionist histories and have been documented across former socialist Europe. Buden (2014) says that these traumas are a product of strong post-socialist tensions to restore capitalism and to evoke a new sense of national and European community. The effect of such a narrative template is that all memories of Yugoslavia are traumatised which helps to create the imaginary of the present Europe as a safe and democratic space in comparison to the dangerous and repressive socialist past. The effect of picturing trauma is thus not to problematise different existing memories of the recent past but rather to narcoticise readers and transform them into uncritical and passive subjects. It comes to a ‘phantasmagoric effect’, according to Robins (1994: 464), whereby techniques of polarisation transform these past events into a sensation. The constant repeated images of crimes, repression and killings arouses fear and disgust in readers towards Partisans and the Communist Party but on the other hand compassion and sympathy for the Home Guards and anti-communist political prisoners in Yugoslavia. Instead of relieving the work of reintegration after presented trauma and ‘finding aids to the past but to the future, as well’ (Zelizer, 2005: 208), Delo’s images reproduce an ideological operation of perpetuating trauma to distance from Yugoslavia.

Memorabilia of the communist revolution have disappeared from the public realm in Slovenia and due to the historical revisionists the tendency to forget Yugoslavia is very strong. However, on the other side, there appears yet another counter-memorial discourse in a public realm in Slovenia: a Yugonostalgia (Velikonja, 2009), although it is far from being as institutionalised as revisionist discourses are. It could be argued that on one side Yugonostalgia is an answer to the aggressive revisionist discourses and stems mostly from the individual memories of people, but on the other side, it is also commercialised and represents a commodification of the socialist Yugoslavia (e.g. bars connected with the memory of Tito or Yugoslavia, kitsch artefacts, such as t-shirts, caps and brooches). Consumerism politically neutralises the historical referents (Yugoslavia, Tito, socialism, communist revolution, etc.), which become empty signifiers and it fills them with aestheticised nostalgia and consumerist meanings (cf. Zei, 2000: 192–195). Mitja Velikonja (2009: 535–538) argues that Yugonostalgia in many cases does not relate to the communist regime, socialist values, the Yugoslav country, but it embodies a utopian hope for a better society than the current one. Such nostalgic commemoration wishes to transcend the unstable, uncertain and risky present. According to Tanja Petrović (2007: 270), this nostalgia can be described in Svetlana Boym’s terms as a reflective nostalgia, which is not restorative or collectivistic but individual; it does not imply loyalty to Yugoslavism or a wish to re-establish the lost country but presents feelings of those who could not identify with the new national post-socialist spaces. A Yugonostalgia discourse plays a role in memory struggles in Slovenia, but it is rarely found in Delo’s images of the past.

Conclusion

The analysis of Delo’s politics of remembering shows that its post-WWII images pictured Partisan movement as democratic and liberating and served the transnational and revolutionary interests of a Yugoslav state. These images pushed memories of Home Guard and post-war killings into oblivion. However, in the late 1980s, with significant political and economic problems in Yugoslavia, Delo’s new politics on picturing the past emerged, which only further strengthened in the 1990s. Earlier collective memory was challenged since earlier images of the past did not allow people to accept new terms and conditions of the individual nation-state and of the free market of the EU due to its past communist revolutionary orientation. For this reason, the old media images were subjected to transformation through the ideological operation of reducing and trivialising the meaning of the Partisans and socialist Yugoslavia and strengthening the meanings of the civil war, post-war killings and the political repression of the Communist Party. Delo’s case proves that these new media memory sites equated Nazism and Communism and no longer emphasised the victims of Fascism or of war as before, but the victims of totalitarian regimes (cf. Kirn, 2014a: 27).

Delo’s present politics of Slovenia’s collective memory is a radical answer to the Delo’s post-war politics of memory, which strictly opposed the Western and American reflexion on communism from the times of the Cold War (cf. Johnson, 2005). However, nowadays, Delo spreads the same anti-communist hysteria when creating fear among people, as well as disgust and hatred against communism and Partisans. Such a hostile imagination of communism and Partisans became an integral part of the contemporary media politics of Slovenia’s collective memory to constrain previous dominant discourses about memory.

Ljiljana Radonic (2011: 360) and Kirn (2014b: 313, 328–329) observe similar trends in all post-Yugoslav countries and talk about these phenomena as a Europeanisation of memory, as the influence of European standards on the national politics of the past. The opportunity to commemorate the collaboration and to represent collaborators as true nationalists who collaborated with the occupying foreign forces only to resist communism was oddly derived from the EU’s reinterpretation of totalitarianism. Namely, the EU introduced the Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in 2009 but in 2012 Slovenia followed Croatia and introduced a more specific version of the commemoration – the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism – that was previously introduced only in Sweden and the ex-Eastern Bloc countries. Communism was in this way equated with Nazism and post-war killings in Slovenia were interpreted as examples of communist Partisans revenge in a Stalinist manner. Radonic (2011) blames the EU for the equalisation of the red and black totalitarianism and for the revisionist politics of the past: ‘Thus, not only has the memory of the victims of Stalinism been added to the European canon, but furthermore, the victims of both regimes have also been explicitly placed on the same level’ (p. 360).

Olick (2007) identifies such shift in the underlying principles of political legitimation and refers to this transformation as the rise of ‘the politics of regret’. While state rhetoric previously focused on heroic commemorations of glorious pasts, the states are now facing their own atrocities and misdeeds in order to establish or maintain legitimacy. This is also evident in the Slovenian case: Delo as an ideological state apparatus and as an institutional arena of handling images of the past plays an ambiguous role in overcoming the difficult and painful moments of the past, since it constructs divisions and trauma. Zelizer (2005: 199–200) argues that media images of the past might create a new individual experience, foster empathy and handle memory as a social problem through the ritual practices of reading these images. However, Delo fails to do that. Its narrative templates constrain the availability of different discourses about memory by converting anti-communist myths into dominant ideologies of present times. The revisionist media narrative templates do not only shape dominant images of the recent past but also create new cultural and historical values, attitudes and beliefs which legitimize the new politics of truth.