Brotherhood and Unity
Near the center of town in Priština, the capital of Kosovo, there stands a monument that consists of three 70-foot high blades of concrete soaring into the sky, leaning away from one another but fused together by slim extenders, almost like afterthoughts, about four-fifths of the way up. It was built in 1961 to commemorate the antifascist fighters during World War II, and its three blades symbolized the three predominant ethnicities of the region: Albanian, Serb, and Montenegrin. It was one of the many spomeniks built by Tito's government across the country in an effort to literally concretize an image of the postwar "brotherhood and unity" that the future of Yugoslavia represented.
It turned out, of course, that Yugoslavia had no future, and the monument now stands in a state of utter decrepitude. The plaza is crumbling, covered with graffiti, and, as the indispensable Spomenik Database details, it has been under threat of imminent demolition, to make way for either a new square dedicated to Adem Jashari, the founder of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or the construction of a parking structure — a different sort of monument to a different set of values.
One would think that a monument against fascism would be an easy thing for everyone to get behind and preserve — or at least I thought that for a naïve moment. As an American I’ve imbibed my entire life the ideology that assumes that, regardless of all else, everyone hates Nazis. When Nazis crop up in Raiders of the Lost Ark or piloting the death star in Star Wars, it's immediately clear that these are the baddies, and they are bad simply because. They hate freedom, murder innocents, and crave power for no rational reason, and will stop at nothing. No one would choose to be on their side.
What a luxury it was to feel that way. Donald Trump's election belatedly brought this home to people like me, but fascism isn't self-evidently repellant or unpopular. It wasn't so even in the mid-20th century, when the atrocities and the wounds of the war that the fascists began were still fresh. Otherwise, the Yugoslavs may not have felt the need to build monuments like the one in Priština or any of the many, many others dedicated to the many, many victims of fascism in the first place.
The point of the monument building seems to have been to create that image of transcendent fascist evil, to render it as vast and almost inexplicable while obfuscating who precisely was responsible for the atrocities. The monuments evoke a generic set of "fascists" as perpetrators, rather than the rival ethnic groups empowered by the invading Axis forces. This abstraction of evil was mirrored in the form of the monuments: As Alysse Kushinski writes in "Non-Commemoration and the Nation: Memory and Forgetting in the Former Yugoslavia," "the national monuments to the victims of fascism, accompanied by a national narrative of omission — one that did not speak of 'who killed whom' — offered the ambiguity modernist commemorative forms are often argued to have."
Regarding the Nazis as universally vilified extremists presumes that the rest of us are naturally unified by our common humanity, sharing the values of respect and tolerance that the Nazis uniquely rejected. But virtually nothing in the history of human experience bears that out. Universal respect for human life and tolerance for cultural difference are not instinctive or intuitive. Rather, history suggests that the fascist approach of essentializing difference and using it to stoke fear, authorize scapegoating, and procure unthinking loyalty has generally been the norm in how power organizes and exerts itself.
The Spomenik Database offers some historical background on what happened during the World War II in Priština. The city was captured by Italian forces in 1941 and the region made part of "Greater Albania," a fascist puppet state. After the annexation, Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, prime minister of this state, reportedly made this announcement in 1942:
We should endeavor to ensure that the Serb population of Kosovo should be removed as soon as possible... all indigenous Serbs who have been living here for centuries should be termed colonialists and as such, via the Albanian and Italian governments, should be sent to concentration camps in Albania. Serbian settlers should be killed.
The Ustaše, the Croatian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis, took a similar approach in the Independent State of Croatia. In general, fascism thrived in the region, as it thrives everywhere, by exacerbating preexisting ethnic or religious tensions; the postwar monuments were meant to reverse that without exactly acknowledging it.
"Instead of formally addressing suffering, modernist memorial sites were intended to catalyze universal gestures of reconciliation, resistance, and modern progress," Gal Kirn and Robert Burghardt write in this article for Manifesta about the memorials. In other words, these monuments tried to construct a universal subject devoted to these fundamental ideals; they tried to represent antifascism as an inherent aspect of what makes us human, which suggests that it is not something that needs to be learned or practiced.
As Yugoslavia came apart in the 1990s, the universal spirit of reconciliation abruptly vanished and the irredentism and the violent attempts at score settling began anew.
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Here is another of the antifascist monuments, the Bubanj memorial at Niš, in Serbia. It's built on a hillside where German forces executed more than ten thousand people, mostly Serbs, from 1942 to 1945. The victims were forced to first dig the trenches there that they would then be buried in after they were shot. Many reportedly are still buried there.
We were there just before the sun set, and the park was mostly deserted. There were a few scattered groups of people, a few families. Some sat at the picnic tables there. I watched a man and a boy who looked to be about eight years old kick a soccer ball back and forth for a while. It was a welcome sign of life in what is an incredibly bleak place in history. The boy would kick the ball as hard as he could into the side of one of the raised stone fists, and then watch it arc back over his head toward his father.
All around Niš, we saw graffiti in Cyrillic lettering: "Kosovo is Serbia." On our first attempt at going to a restaurant in the pedestrianized part of town, we were turned away — "Is full" — though there seemed to be plenty of tables. Another couple came in a moment after us and sat themselves down without a fuss. We went back to our phone to try to figure out somewhere else to eat.
In 1990, Niš was the site of a NATO cluster bombing that missed its intended target and instead detonated in the city center, killing more than a dozen civilians. On the outskirts of town, on the main road that eventually leads to Istanbul, there is a tower made of human skulls, built by the Turks in 1809 after they suppressed a Serbian rebellion. It was built as a warning; now it is maintained as a tourist attraction of sorts. Not far from there is the site of the Crveni Krst concentration camp, from which 105 prisoners escaped on February 12, 1942. In reprisal, the Nazis murdered 1,000 people up on the Bubanj hillside, as a warning.
Walking back to our hotel, a white station wagon pulled up along aside of us and rolled down its windows. We had just crossed a complicated intersection without looking, but this car seemed to come out of nowhere. The man in the passenger seat berated us in Serbian without turning his head to look at us. We kept walking, not sure what it was about or what we were supposed to do.