Forgetting and Remembering the Socialist Past

Abstract

In the early 1990s, the cultural landscape of Croatia went through radical changes, one of them being the destruction of the monuments built under socialism. Drawing on the author’s research on the monuments in the capital city of Zagreb, and on the existing research on the politics of memory in the broader post-Yugoslav region, this article asks about the disappearance of the monuments to partisan women in contemporary Zagreb. The main research question regards the gender dimension of the under-representation of women in public space. The hypothesis is that egalitarian gender relations, analyzed here through memorial representation, are important for the democratization of post-socialist societies. Additional focus is on ethnic belonging as an influential explanatory category in accounting for the disappearance of monuments to minority women in contemporary Croatia. The article adds a new empirical vantage point to help better understand the comparative framework of how the socialist past is remembered through monuments.