Education has been said to be one of the most important state-controlled redistributions of history (see Wertsch 2002); this is particularly evident in a post-war context like BiH (see Hill 2011). Vuckovic (2012) shows in the case of members of the Croatian post-war generation that they. A few years after the war ended, the Croats rebuilt a few classrooms and claimed ownership of the school.
However, we must be aware that the attitude of the international community towards the language issue is also ambivalent. One of the central principles of the Guidelines states that the region and country of BiH should be the main reference points in textbooks (see Karge 2008: 22). The fact that the date of the outbreak of the war in BiH also varies says a lot.
Even if the war in the 1990s is not covered in the curriculum of Canton 7 (the canton Mostar belongs to), it is likely that discussion of the war finds its way into the classroom. Not all pupils seem to notice this, but some do and point in the direction of the stone with their carnations. When referring to the beauty of the Neretva, the speaker anchors the nation's identity in nature.
The soldier's central message to the students was simple: there are good people (us Bosniaks) and there are bad people (Serbs and Croats), and even though we have won the battle, we must be vigilant in the future.
Rewriting History and Placing the Nation
For example, one of the lecture halls at the time still held a world map in Cyrillic letters, a holdover from the old university. This connection with the Franciscans is also visible in the Sveuciliste logo, which shows the building of the Franciscan Monastery in Mostar. 10 I got this information in an interview with the staff of one of the organizations of victims of Bosnian detention camps in Mostar.
Thus, the war was also tangible for me, not only in the lecturer's presentations – where history was often examined from the perspective of the most recent war – but also on the premises of the university. On a rainy day, looking at the ruins through the barred window of one of the lecture rooms is rather depressing. In BiH, historians are not spokesmen for the state, but rather for their respective nations.
This authority to speak in the name of the people was also emphasized by lecturers I encountered at the two universities. This became most evident when a student's view of history differed from that of the lecturer. Instead, the lecturer's interpretation is in line with that of the first president of Croatia (also a historian), Franjo Tuđman, who downplayed the number of victims of the NDH (see Campbell 1998).
For example, the dominant Croatian public discourse claims that Tito discriminated against the Croatian people because of crimes committed by the NDH. As will be explored further in the rest of the chapter, the violence of the Bosnian people is at the center of the Bosnian local history representation. The Serbs are presented as the initiators of the war by both Croats and Bosniaks.
For the lecturer, the period in Yugoslavia was only about the oppression of the Croatian nation. In this narrative, the Croats and Serbs are perceived as threats to the Bosnian nation because of their denial of the latter's independent existence. In recounting the local history of the 20th century, two concepts were predominant for Faruk: fascism and genocide.
The demolition of the Old Bridge meant for them the elimination, the extermination of the Bosniaks on the banks. In the case of the Bosniaks, the authors of the textbooks suggest that the recent war can be explained (and perhaps even predicted) by events in the past, by the ten-year (or even century-old) hostility of the Croats and Serbs against the Bosniaks (see Torsti.
Towards Multi-Perspectivity
This is how history is taught even to young students, as I learned during a workshop on writing multi-perspective textbooks organized by the OSCE together with the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. History textbooks used in BiH are often written in an encyclopedic style (listing historical 'facts') and do not encourage students and teachers to engage with different perspectives of historical events. There is little room for either interpretation or discussion, and the history of everyday life (eg from the period of Tito's Yugoslavia) is completely excluded from most textbooks.
Her main goal was to discuss multiperspectivism in textbooks, which aimed to create a space for discussion in the classroom and allow students to make their own judgments about where to locate historical truth.17 Although university students are sometimes invited to participate in such discussions, their classrooms , are quickly reprimanded if their presentations of history do not match those authorized by the lecturer. Regardless of this bias, or perhaps because of it, Bosniak and Croatian historians constantly emphasize the objectivity of historiography. The nationalization of the past goes hand in hand with a coherent authoritarian narrative that leaves no room for multiperspectivity.
Even if in this chapter the dominant Bosnian and Croat public discourses were discussed separately from the narratives of the three generations, I am by no means suggesting that we can clearly delineate between the two types of narrative. As noted in the introduction, the differentiation between discursive strategies (identified in dominant public discourses) and discursive tactics (identified in narratives. 17 A multi-perspective project was initiated in 2003 by a group of historians from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia under the umbrella of EUROCLIO (European Association of History Educators) and resulted in a common textbook Obični ljudi u odvojnoj zemlji, životni život u Bosni i Hercegovina, Hrvatski i Srbiji 5–1919.
Jugoslavija izdomje Istoka i Zapada (Ordinary people in an extraordinary place - everyday life in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. In a conversation with one of the authors, I was told that to date only a small number of copies have found their way theirs in the classroom... of three generations) makes it clear that individuals who are not professionally involved in (re-)writing the past find their narratives and interpretations of the past in a field predetermined by public discourse dominant, but at the same time they are not fully determined by him. As will be shown in the following chapters, individuals use dominant public discourses in different ways and their narratives are never independent of them (even if they are strongly positioned against them).
Personal narratives are informed (but not determined) by current dominant public discourses as well as past dominant public discourses to which individuals of different generations have been exposed (especially during their formative and educational years). Even if this means that personal narratives cannot be precisely separated from the dominant public discourses promoted by professionals involved in the "national project", analytical differentiation helps to carve out the specific ways in which individuals with different generational positions reposition themselves vis-à-vis past after major political changes. In addition, it allows us to consider the influences and responses to dominant public discourses by individuals who draw on a certain range of personal experiences and share a certain period of life, a certain life situation.
Bibliography
There is no direct transmission between teachers/professors and pupils/students, nor is there any direct transmission of 'collective memories' from generation to generation. Belonging in the Two Berliners: Kin, State, Nation, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. 20th Century History in the Textbooks of Bosnia and Herzegovina: An Analysis of Books Used for the Final Grades of Primary School.
Fünf Paradoxien von Menschenrechtsfragen aus der Sicht der ethischen Rekonstruktion der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften in Bosnien und Herzegowina – Thesen.
