ANTIFAŠIZAM KAO MESTO SEĆANJA: ČITANJE IZ PERSPEKTIVE 21. VEKA
ANTI-FASCISM AS A PLACE OF MEMORY: A 21ST CENTURY READING

Summary/Abstract: One of the motives to write this article was the statement that “there is no common remembrance culture“ (Kolditz). On the one hand, this necessitates a plurality of memories, but on the other, it bears a risk of revisionism and relativisation of the antifascist struggle and its societal and cultural legacies. That is why I decided to look back at the recent Yugoslav literary past and evoke protagonists, topics and auctorial positions which made antifascism as the place of memory an integral part of the cultural discourse. It should be stressed that the authors whose works I introduced in this article also critically looked at the mythologems of the SFRY. Hence, this kind of analysis shows that the narratives of remembrance, despite the efforts of the ruling ideology to make them homogenous and indisputable, can be subverted and questioned, especially within and by literature which itself deals with narration and narrativization. Special focus on the play Hrvatski Faust (Croatian Faust, 1981) by Slobodan Šnajder is expressive: by establishing a parallelism among the action and the protagonists in the time of the NDH and the following communist period, the author suggests the congruency between the repressive policies of the Ustasha but also of the Yugoslav, antifascist establishment. Being a valuable literary document of the resistance to repression in any system, this play also questions the exploitation of the antifascist narrative as the mythologeme which undermines the critique of the authoritarian politics effectuated by the declared antifascist state. Conclusions of this article centre on the need to critically revaluate the past, but also to persist in defending values represented by antifascism as the place of memory and the foundation of the present and future society of humanity and justice.

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