I am currently writing a book about emotion, memory culture and the Second World War in socialist Yugoslavia Address: London, London, City of, United Kingdom
The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the polit... more The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the politics of construction and destruction in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement. Bringing together established historians of the Ustasha regime and an emerging generation of younger historians, The Utopia of Terror explores various aspects of everyday life and death in the Ustasha state that until now have received peripheral attention from historians. The contributors argue for a more complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism in which the two are seen as part of the same process rather than as discrete phenomena. They aim to bring new perspectives, generate original thinking, and provide enhanced understanding of both the Ustasha regime's attempts to remake Croatian society and its campaign to destroy unwanted populations.
This article looks at the production of autobiography and imposture as survival techniques during... more This article looks at the production of autobiography and imposture as survival techniques during the Second World War in Croatia. Focusing on the petitions of Jewish and Serb citizens wrote to the Jewish Section of the Ustaša Police Directorate and the State Directorate for Reconstruction the article considers the various ways in which Serb and Jewish letter writers who had been placed outside the law in wartime Croatia by the Ustaša regime used a variety of discourse and linguistic markers as well as the generation of idealised biographies in which they identified themselves as Croats in an attempt to escape deportation, ghettoiza-tion or stigmatisation and to write themselves into state ideology by asserting their difference from other members of their persecuted community. The article also explores the various ways in which victims who had survived by making compromises with the Ustaša regime sought to rewrite their biographies in the postwar period to identify themselves with the new socialist orthodoxies in the face of the threat of nationwide campaigns of unmasking and ideological purification. Using Christa Wolf's novel The Quest for Christa T. as a frame, it asks how much the historian can ever really know about the biographies of individuals , especially those who have felt the need to reconstruct their lives after traumatic events. At the same time it argues that in addition to the important insight these kinds of microanalysis can provide on everyday life and survival in wartime Europe during the Holocaust, they also bring ambiguity to seemingly distinct historiographical categories such as resistance and collaboration and force us, the readers, to confront our own subjectivity through reading their autobiographical petitions. " Successful revolutions tear off masks: that is, they invalidate the conventions of self-presentation and social interaction that obtained in pre-revolutionary societies […] In such upheavals, people have to reinvent themselves, to create or find within themselves personae that fit the new post-revolutionary society. " So wrote Sheila Fitzpatrick in Tear off the Masks! her history of imposture and identity in Soviet Rus-sia. Paradoxically, she argued, while revolutionary militants " tend to become obsessed with authenticity and transparency " , hunting for " careerists " and " accommo-dators " in order to unmask them, they also demand that ordinary citizens invent new identities in order to demonstrate their loyalty to the revolutionary new society and its values. 1 To the extent that all history is in some senses biography and all biography identity, periods of revolution and violent upheaval have often resulted in the writing (and rewriting) of autobiographical texts by ordinary citizens, in particular by those who fear they might be the victims of the terror accompanying the revolution and so seek ways to negotiate it. The study of diaries written by everyday people is now an established part of the historiography of the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s in the Soviet Union; petitions written to the state by Soviet citizens during the 1 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, New Jersey 2005, 3.
The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the polit... more The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the politics of construction and destruction in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement. Bringing together established historians of the Ustasha regime and an emerging generation of younger historians, The Utopia of Terror explores various aspects of everyday life and death in the Ustasha state that until now have received peripheral attention from historians. The contributors argue for a more complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism in which the two are seen as part of the same process rather than as discrete phenomena. They aim to bring new perspectives, generate original thinking, and provide enhanced understanding of both the Ustasha regime's attempts to remake Croatian society and its campaign to destroy unwanted populations.
This article looks at the production of autobiography and imposture as survival techniques during... more This article looks at the production of autobiography and imposture as survival techniques during the Second World War in Croatia. Focusing on the petitions of Jewish and Serb citizens wrote to the Jewish Section of the Ustaša Police Directorate and the State Directorate for Reconstruction the article considers the various ways in which Serb and Jewish letter writers who had been placed outside the law in wartime Croatia by the Ustaša regime used a variety of discourse and linguistic markers as well as the generation of idealised biographies in which they identified themselves as Croats in an attempt to escape deportation, ghettoiza-tion or stigmatisation and to write themselves into state ideology by asserting their difference from other members of their persecuted community. The article also explores the various ways in which victims who had survived by making compromises with the Ustaša regime sought to rewrite their biographies in the postwar period to identify themselves with the new socialist orthodoxies in the face of the threat of nationwide campaigns of unmasking and ideological purification. Using Christa Wolf's novel The Quest for Christa T. as a frame, it asks how much the historian can ever really know about the biographies of individuals , especially those who have felt the need to reconstruct their lives after traumatic events. At the same time it argues that in addition to the important insight these kinds of microanalysis can provide on everyday life and survival in wartime Europe during the Holocaust, they also bring ambiguity to seemingly distinct historiographical categories such as resistance and collaboration and force us, the readers, to confront our own subjectivity through reading their autobiographical petitions. " Successful revolutions tear off masks: that is, they invalidate the conventions of self-presentation and social interaction that obtained in pre-revolutionary societies […] In such upheavals, people have to reinvent themselves, to create or find within themselves personae that fit the new post-revolutionary society. " So wrote Sheila Fitzpatrick in Tear off the Masks! her history of imposture and identity in Soviet Rus-sia. Paradoxically, she argued, while revolutionary militants " tend to become obsessed with authenticity and transparency " , hunting for " careerists " and " accommo-dators " in order to unmask them, they also demand that ordinary citizens invent new identities in order to demonstrate their loyalty to the revolutionary new society and its values. 1 To the extent that all history is in some senses biography and all biography identity, periods of revolution and violent upheaval have often resulted in the writing (and rewriting) of autobiographical texts by ordinary citizens, in particular by those who fear they might be the victims of the terror accompanying the revolution and so seek ways to negotiate it. The study of diaries written by everyday people is now an established part of the historiography of the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s in the Soviet Union; petitions written to the state by Soviet citizens during the 1 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, New Jersey 2005, 3.
The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the polit... more The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the politics of construction and destruction in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement. Bringing together established historians of the Ustasha regime and an emerging generation of younger historians, The Utopia of Terror explores various aspects of everyday life and death in the Ustasha state that until now have received peripheral attention from historians. The contributors argue for a more complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism in which the two are seen as part of the same process rather than as discrete phenomena. They aim to bring new perspectives, generate original thinking, and provide enhanced understanding of both the Ustasha regime's attempts to remake Croatian society and its campaign to destroy unwanted populations.
Global Yugoslavia: New research on Yugoslavia in transnational, comparative and global perspectives, 1918-2018, Goldsmiths University, 28 November 2018, 2019
Expert interviewee for French documentary dir. Mirjana Bojic-Walters and Charles-Antoine de Rouvr... more Expert interviewee for French documentary dir. Mirjana Bojic-Walters and Charles-Antoine de Rouvre, 2018
This article looks at how ordinary Serb and Jewish victims in the wartime Independent State of Cr... more This article looks at how ordinary Serb and Jewish victims in the wartime Independent State of Croatia attempted to negotiate the terror of the mass deportations to Serbia, ghettoization, economic destruction and wearing of the Jewish insignia through petition writing and attempting to identify themselves with the Croatian nation in whose name they were being persecuted by the Ustasha regime. Using a comparative and subjective framework it analyses their letters in the wider context of similar petition writing and subjective processes of other totalitarian states - for example, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - during times of terror.
This article examines memory culture and its evolution in socialist Yugoslavia. In particular, it... more This article examines memory culture and its evolution in socialist Yugoslavia. In particular, it considers how the postwar Yugoslav state aimed to come to terms with the mass intercommunal violence precipitated by the occupation and the rule of various local fascist organizations. Using the case study of the Ustasha atrocities in Glina in the spring and summer of 1941, two of the most infamous massacres in wartime Croatia, it explores how the authorities in the postwar federal Republic of Croatia aimed to create a common narrative which stressed the state's guiding principles of brotherhood and unity while addressing the fact that the massacres had been committed by members of one ethnic group (the Croats) against members of another (the Serb minority). It also examines how artists and writers were mobilized in the campaign to make sense of genocide and the fratricidal slaughter of the 1940s, in particular through creating a sharp division between "Ustasha criminals" on one side and the mass front of "patriotic Croatian working people" on the other. The article uses the moving testimony by the sole apparent survivor, Ljubo Jednak, and the haunting photograph said to depict the Glina victims shortly before their mass execution to unravel how it was that this specific war crime came to acquire such a central place in the canon of Yugoslav historiography of the Second World War as a meta-symbol of the horror of fascist occupation. The article argues that while the official narrative about the occupation of wartime Croatia and the genocide committed by the Ustasha regime appeared to be hegemonic, in reality from the outset there was significant contestation about what had happened in Glina and the meanings that were attached to the massacres. Despite the efforts of the party to control and mediate the terms of the memory politics, especially within the Serb community, they were never totally successful. Moreover, since the narrative about the Second World War was closely connected to the legitimation of the revolution, national liberation struggle and the postwar retributive purges, many of the core tenets of Yugoslav memory politics, as the example of Glina illustrates, did not remain monolithic but changed over time to reflect broader ideological and national changes within the Yugoslav federation. This particularly became apparent in the late 1960s in the wake of the mass national movement in Croatia. By the time armed conflict broke out in the early 1990s between the newly-independent Croatian state and its Serb minority, the memory politics of the Glina atrocity which had sought to bring Serbs and Croats together as Yugoslavs and overcome national enmity was already helping to divide them along ethnic lines. As such, the memory politics of Glina represented a metaphor for the rise and fall of the Yugoslav ideal. Serbs and Croats, like the victims in the photograph, were frozen by the lens of history, increasingly separated by different conceptions of the past and the meanings that should be taken from it. Keywords: Glina, photography, genocide, memory culture, Ustasha regime, wartime Croatia, socialist Yugoslavia
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Papers by Rory Yeomans
Keywords: Glina, photography, genocide, memory culture, Ustasha regime, wartime Croatia, socialist Yugoslavia