EDUCATION ABOUT FASCISM ON THE PLACES OF TERROR

The Museum of Banjica Concentration Camp

31. 08. 2017 12:00

Expert guided tours and discussions

We invite all interested persons for visits, guided tours and discussions at the places of terror inflicted by occupation and collaborationist forces during the WW2 in Belgrade. The overall aim of our collective visits is getting to know better current approaches and practices in education about historical fascism on those memorial locations.

We are beginning our expert guided tours in the Museum of the Banjica Concentration Camp in order to remember the regime of terror and the victims of the politics of occupation and collaborationist forces, as well as to learn about the capacities and conceptions of the educational function of those institutions in the context of intensive changes of the official narratives of WW2 history in Yugoslav area. On the location of Topovske šupe concentration camp we will discuss, after a guided tour, the current state of affairs, the status and the future function of this historical place. According to the criteria of respective existing institutions, the site should be declared a protected cultural monument, but according to the plans of Delta Company, it is designated as a location for a shopping mall. After that, we will visit the Memorial Park Jajinci, where alongside a recapitulation of historical knowledge on the largest mass execution place and grave site during the WW2 in Serbia we will discuss the politics and practices of memorialization in the times of the emergence, institutional affirmation and often domination of an unscientific revision of the WW2 history in the post-Yugoslav as well as broader European context.

The tours will be guided by Milovan Pisari, a historian from the Center for Holocaust Research and Education, Darko Ćirić, a historian and senior curator at the Belgrade City Museum as well as the author of the permanent display of the Museum of the Banjica Concentration Camp, and Marijana Stojčić, a sociologist and activist in the Antifascist Alliance as well a researcher within the program of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis entitled "Dealing with the Past: Narrative, Memory and Social Representations of Historical Trauma".

Alongside historical factography, memorial politics and practices of past and present, discussions will also include questions such as who, how and for what reason is remembering the WW2 victims today, and what protective measures are adopted or implemented in relation to it. The common issue for all the locations is also what are the visitors of such places faced with in current political and cultural context after the recent institutional, legal and social value remodeling of antifascist history and tradition of socialist Serbia and socialist Yugoslavia.

Photograph: The Execution of Civilians in Jajinci 1941

(source: https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strelište_u_Jajincima)