ABSTRACT
Even if one might not agree with the statement that there is a common European collective memory of the Second World War, there seems to be an imagined consensus on which political and military organizations stood against Fascism. However, when one shifts from a pan-European to a regional and national layer of historical memory, this seemingly clear-cut division becomes more nuanced. The Manichean narrative of socialist Yugoslavia, in which there was only one anti-Fascist movement, has been challenged and distorted by memory-makers of successor states to various extents. The dispute over who opposed Fascism, who fought against the occupation, to what extent the anti-Fascist liberators were legitimate, and who defended national interests is still vigorous and ongoing (Brunnbauer 2004; Pavlaković 2008; Ramet and Listhaug 2011). The aim of this chapter is to deconstruct how the main political groups and military formations, active in Yugoslavia during WWII, are presented in contemporary history textbooks written in the language that used to be dominant in Yugoslavia 1 —that is the textbooks from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Our goal is to answer these questions by utilizing history textbooks as a lens through which to examine the ongoing contestations of WWII memories in the post-Yugoslav states.
