Remembering and forgetting World War II within the changing political context from 1945 to the present

Public usage of WW II monuments in Slovakia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Slovakia · Bosnia-Herzegovina

The aim of this project is to research the changing perception of the past in Slovakia and Bosnia-Herzegovina through the public reception of WWII monuments from 1945 to the present. As former parts of the composite multinational communist states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, both sovereign states are now developing their own agendas of remembrance concerning WWII. The first stage of the project will be to select particular WWII monuments in both countries and then to investigate the context of their construction, their iconography and how they were utilised in public life in the Communist and post-Communist periods. We will examine Communist secondary literature on these memorials, as well as material in the Belgrade and Prague archives in order to compile visual documentations of the public ceremonies at these sites from their construction to the present. The sites selected for study will be photographically documented by the researchers to record the current state of the monuments and the surrounding landscape. We will create an internet exhibition to show the visual and textual documents of the remembrance landscapes before and after the transformation of both countries.