Croatia and the First World War: National Forgetting in a Memorial Shatter Zone?

Sindbæk Andersen and Dedović investigate the public memory of the First World War in Croatia. By analysing historiographies, history schoolbooks and public debates, the authors aim to trace the development of Croatian First World War memory: they argue that this memory was rather vague and often almost absent in Croatia before 2013, and that this was largely caused by the absence of a Croatian national tradition of remembering the First World War during the Yugoslav period. This chapter proposes to explain this void by discussing Croatia’s status as a “memorial shatter zone,” a region where public memory narratives are fissured and unstable as a result of changing political conditions leading to disputes and shifting demands of history and memory.