Organised by Documenta — Centre for Dealing with the Past<\/p>\n
26 September 2013, Zagreb, Croatia<\/p>\n
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As a guest\/participant, I attended the conference to mark the end of the first phase of the project that collects personal testimonies of political violence from 1941 to the present day into a video database (450 testimonies collected).\u00a0http:\/\/www.osobnasjecanja.hr\/<\/a><\/p>\n Apart from the Dutch Ambassadress, welcoming remarks were also given by personal representatives of the Croatian president and minister of culture, who were unable to attend.\u00a0 I mention this because it is indicative of the institutional support given to this programme despite the perceived unfavourable climate in Croatia for matters of dealing with the past. I mean to say that things are changing, little by little, the public space is becoming more receptive to voices with a critical attitude towards the past and the culture of memory fostered in Croatia, and especially towards the so-called “dignity of the homeland war”, that is, the injustices committed by Croatian forces.<\/p>\n The keynote speeches were followed by four panels on the following topics: the relationship between social and individual memory, the need for personal testimony and possible ways of using recorded oral histories for educational, research, museum and artistic purposes.<\/p>\n Much was said about the importance of personal testimonies, but I would like to point out the following:<\/p>\n Nothing can take the place of human testimony in constructing social memories.<\/p>\n History is not a closed book, there is no one single narrative.<\/p>\n Memories fade, memorials, for the most part, remain.<\/p>\n Personal memories are important as a corrective to social history developed somewhere between scholarly work and the ideological context.<\/p>\n