Heroes of a New Kind: Commemorations and Appropriations of Yugoslavia’s Sporting and Pop-Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Post-Yugoslav nations under construction struggle with one another over many things, collective identities included. They are also pained with surviving symbolic legacies and cultures of memory of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia after whose destruction they were created through wars. More than 20 years after the end of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), the post-Yugoslav states continue to deal with selection, appropriation and re-distribution of the common state’s cultural property, myths, symbols, heroes, memorials and historical legacies that resist revisionism. Most of these cultural clashes take place in domains of popular culture including sport, pop and rock music and film in which the socialist-era nation was prolific and internationally recognized. Since heroic cults from pre-modern ethnic history do not suffice for the construction of new nationhood, post-Yugoslav nations need national icons from the most controversial historical periods such as World War II, the socialist era, and the wars and transition of the 1990s. Popular culture and sport are both part of an attractive and usable past. Late Yugoslav-era popular culture and sport, especially from the 1970s to the 1980s are a treasury of the usable past.

Out of about a hundred people who led us to democracy, some 50 of them ended up at the Hague tribunal’s most wanted lists; 30 others have been tried by national criminal courts; about a dozen or less seem to be honest people, and for the rest, sufficient evidence for criminal prosecution has hitherto not been found.

Boris Rašeta, Writer, Croatian weekly Novosti, 710, July 26, 2013, 31

The naming of a street in our city after the popular rock performer Milan Mladenović, is an honor and recognition of a remarkable generation that began thriving in the last decade of socialism in Yugoslavia. But the memory of this epoch and this generation has been brutally suppressed during the 1990s.

Statement for the media by the Chairman of the Municipal Committee for naming of streets and public places in Zagreb, Croatia, 2012

The common Yugoslav cultural space does not need to be restored because it never ceased to function although the post-Yugoslav regimes have made every effort aimed at destroying it.

Marko Brecelj, Slovenian rock musician and conceptual artist, in an interview, 2012