My students at the University of Regensburg and the University of Graz are predominantly located at home in the present. This is not surprising, as these 20-30-year-olds are building a home that is characterized by the completed separation from the parental home, stable friendships or partnerships, and the first children, thus the establishment of their own home.
What role does the past play for other people, in other generations and in other spaces? To explore this and other related questions, I travelled to Lika in Croatia in May 2024, a region where the memory of the past is a fiercely contested commodity. We were interested in the role of memory in a space that was, for a long time, an ethnically mixed space due to historical causes and where violence eventually erupted inter-ethnically. We were also interested in how former perpetrators of one war or another and former victims of one war or another live together or lived together for a long time in this space and how this situation is dealt with in terms of the culture and politics of remembrance. Finally, we wanted to explore how memory functions in a space that has ultimately become an ethnically largely segregated space as a result of forced migration and escape. Is the idea of home in this space necessarily a different one, namely one that is shaped not by the present but by the past?
In the following, I will first briefly introduce Lika as a historical region. I will then describe one of the places we visited – the bay of Slana – and the discussion that arose for us on the above questions. The perspective taken in this essay is mine and that of my students, none of whom are native to this space and none of whom were born in Lika. But in the course of the excursion, we all developed a specific idea of what it means for people who are or were at home in this region to (not) remember war crimes that took place here.
Lika is an area which, due to its historical specificity – the establishment of the Habsburg military border – became a very special landscape in Croatia in an ethnic sense, namely one in which there was a very large influx of Orthodox Slavs, later called Serbs. In the past, an ethnically mixed region emerged here – populated by Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs – who, equally attracted by the advantages promised by the military border (for example, the personal freedom of farmers), settled here. With the dissolution of the military border at the end of the 19th century, however, a process began in Lika that can most succinctly be described as depopulation. Apart from a few episodes, the entire 20th century was characterized by this process. The strongest migratory movements were recorded during the Second World War and what is now known in Croatia as the Homeland War (1991-1995). In the former, Lika lost almost a quarter of its population, and in the latter, over 40 per cent. Both wars, and even more so the latter, were also waged as ethnic wars. During the Second World War, the Croatian Ustashe installed a racist and nationalist regime of terror in the fascist independent state of Croatia, which was primarily directed against Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents. At the beginning of the Homeland War, the internationally unrecognized Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) was proclaimed, which also included the eastern territory of Lika. At the beginning of this war, Croatian Serbs expelled and murdered the Croats living here in Lika. The conflict was then frozen, and international troops under a United Nations mandate guarded the unwilling peace, interrupted by war crimes on both sides, until finally, in 1995, in the course of the military operation Oluja, there was a mass exodus and expulsion of Croatian Serbs from Lika. Only a few returned afterwards.
In other words, we are dealing with different and changing groups of perpetrators and victims in one and the same territory over a period of around 50 years – which must essentially and alternately be called Croatian and Serbian. It should also be noted that we are dealing with a historically evolved, once ethnically mixed border area, the former military border, which at the end of the 20th century became an ethnically largely segregated border area – and thus also an ethnically largely segregated area of remembrance.
So here lies the problem of remembrance culture and remembrance policy: who should, may and can remember how and what? What happens when former perpetrators of one war or another and former victims of one war or another live together or have lived together for a long time? How does remembrance work in an ethnically segregated space and what does this mean for the feeling and experience of home?
One of the places we visit is the bay of Slana on the island of Pag. There is no more vegetation on this part of the island, only karst rock. The May sun burns mercilessly on the stone and on us as we walk past tourists sunbathing on the rocks in a bay not far away. We read on the Internet (beach-searcher.de/) that Slana beach is ranked 49th out of 70 beaches in the Lika-Senj region. It is praised in particular for the amenities that the seclusion of this place brings for bathers. What the website does not reveal is that the bay of Slana is not only a picturesque, secluded spot on a Croatian Adriatic island but was also the site of an Ustasha concentration camp during the Second World War, where thousands of Serbs and Jews were murdered. To commemorate the victims of this place, the local veterans’ association erected a small memorial plaque in Slana Bay, below the former extermination camp, in 1975. It was just a small sign, but one that enabled the bereaved families of the victims to remember their relatives who had been murdered here. A place that, despite all the pain, made it possible to put down roots because it made wounds visible – not with the aim of keeping them open, but to offer healing. When a new war broke out in Lika at the beginning of the 1990s, the memorial plaque was quickly destroyed. New memorial plaques were erected twice more, in 2010 and 2013, but these were destroyed by local residents within a few days.
We look at the completely unmarked remains of a building of the former camp. We look at the nearby, recently erected Orthodox cross. What does it mean, I ask the students, when victims of one war (Serbs in the Second World War) become perpetrators in another war (in the course of the establishment of the RSK)? What should happen to the memories of the victims? Who may, who must (no longer) remember what?
We remain silent for a long time. Answers to this question are not easy. One student says that remembering victims is always important, regardless of whether members of this group became perpetrators in another war. It has, she says, something to do with home, with a feeling of being at home: I am at home where I can be free, where I don’t have to be afraid. And finally, she adds: in particular, I don’t have to be afraid that my present or, yes, even my past will be taken away from me. Because where signs of remembrance are destroyed, an attempt is made to take away pasts, to rewrite or erase the past, and therefore also to de-home people.
So what might home be for the people who keep destroying memorials in the bay of Slana? Does their image of home go hand in hand with the certainty that the perpetrators of one war could not possibly have been the victims of another? Or with the conviction that perpetration in one war cancels out victimhood in another war, but only in relation to members of the other ethnic group? Or even with the conviction that perpetration by people of one’s own ethnic group need not (or no longer) be mentioned at all?
Therefore, what, on the other hand, might be home for the people who set up memorials again and again in the bay of Slana and again and again see them destroyed? Who remembers the victims of one war, even though people of the same ethnic group became perpetrators in another war? Who cannot or do not want to forget that they were once at home here? We have read that Lika is one of the regions in Croatia with the highest rate of returnees. And yet the number and, in particular, the composition of the returnees suggest that the Lika homeland will soon come to an end for the Serbs who once lived here or have returned, along with the ever-destroyed signs of remembrance. It is mainly the old people who have returned. The young either stayed elsewhere, migrated further towards Western Europe, or, if they once lived here, have now also left. For all young people, the weak economic situation in Lika is likely to be the main reason for leaving or not returning. Lika has been a structurally weak region with little potential for economic growth throughout the 20th century, but even more so as a result of the last war. The fact that the signs of remembrance, the symbolic signs through which a group assures itself of its common past, have also disappeared is likely only to encourage this development.
Due to the contested past, the feeling of home in Lika encompasses both temporal dimensions: the present as well as the past. Only where the past is not contested can the feeling of home very well and very pleasurably extend purely to the present. Home can be the present where there is no need to fear for the past. And perhaps it is more the case that both temporal dimensions are always there, just not equally present. One thing seems certain: if the past is contested, it pushes itself much more visibly into what we imagine as home in Lika. As students and lecturers at the University of Graz, we have come to the conclusion after this journey that home is where both times – the present and the past – do not necessarily have to find a space but can very well do so.
Heike Karge is a Southeast European history and anthropology professor at the University of Graz, Austria. She focuses on the cultural and social history of Southeast Europe, particularly the culture of remembrance and the history of psychiatry.
