Conclusion
The marches that brought Yugoslav youth to sites where the antifascist guerrillas had fought for liberation and revolution provided a pilgrimage-like setting in which the officially sanctioned interpretation of the recent past could be affectively disseminated.
As the official authors of Yugoslav educational and remembrance policies frequently pointed out, having young people repeat the same acts and go through the same situations as their ideological referents (to the extent they could be recreated in the first place) created far more of an impression than any kind of conventional education. Just like, in some other historical contexts, religious pilgrimages and passion plays were important cultural tools for making “proper” Christians, partisan marches and reenactments were supposed to contribute to raising “proper” socialist Yugoslavs who would live the officially espoused values of antifascism, brotherhood and unity, and commitment to self-managing socialism.The relationship between the wartime events, narratives, persons, and places and their postwar reconstructions were contentious and dependent on situational particularities. Routing collective mobility according to historical trails sparked a peculiar case of pilgrimage design. The initial postwar years witnessed a proliferation of battle reenactments that were directly modeled after actual events and people, putting participants in the shoes of concrete partisan units and carefully delineating the spatiotemporal context that was being “reconstructed.” However, starting from the 1960s, the nature of partisan marches changed, settling into a more flexible approach to reliving history through different historically colored details rather than fully reconstructing it. This was due to the overarching shift in Yugoslav memory politics that aimed at a more pragmatic and future-oriented way of dealing with the past, in line with the official ideology of “perpetualRetracing the Revolution 121 revolution.” Consequently, the commemorative function of partisan pilgrimages increasingly turned into game-like events where participants used their own abilities and creativity to script their performance of the past.
While the reenactors’ agency arguably increased, it was still confined by the dominant discursive strategies through which individual participation had to be filtered.The later phase of Yugoslav socialism also saw a change regarding the authority to label certain reenactments of the past as authentic, as well as the criteria by which this could be done. This was most visible in the issue of the authenticity of the locations where the reenactments took place. After the initial insistence on historically accurate routes, the 1960s saw a tendency toward more spatial flexibility, offering possibilities for application in local communities across the federation and the use of available local historical and geographical “resources.” This still implied that the overarching topic of these practices had to do with young Yugoslavs “reliving” the history of the People’s Liberation Struggle; however, the emphasis was not on the bodily presence at historical locations but rather on the performed activities and employed narratives being modeled according to the imagined partisan archetype. Eventually, the social-political organizations started framing their regular activities within the format of partisan reenactments. Presenting otherwise “non-political” outdoor practices as the affirmation of the values of the People’s Liberation Struggle or as spreading the spirit of brotherhood and unity endowed the leagues’ quotidian functioning with political actuality while conveniently securing finances and logistical support for their local branches. What was at hand in these developments was the negotiation between the state-controlled institutions and the local-level activists concerning the right to use and redefine the label of authenticity when it came to the People’s Liberation Struggle, as well as the right to create and disseminate historical knowledge to different audiences.
An important aspect of partisan reenactments that is difficult to grasp from the available historical sources concerns the attitudes, experiences, and motivations of the participants.
What can be reasonably assumed is that for many Yugoslavs, setting off along revolutionary trails was the first opportunity (and very often one of only a few) to visit distant regions of the country and interact with members of other Yugoslav ethnicities through encounters which were often termed “Yugoslavia writ small.” Even though many contemporaries criticized participants’ lack of a fitting attitude, the empirical research mostly failed to showcase recorded incidents that could be interpreted as politically motivated. Finally, even though the system of partisan reenactments ceased to exist along with the Yugoslav federation, there are certain points of continuity between these practices and similar formats which emerged in post-Yugoslav societies after the dissolution of the common state and the subsequent military conflicts. Some of these practices refer to a more distant past (such as the reenactment of the “Albanian Golgotha” of the Serbian army in 1915 or the commemorationof the Bleiburg massacre of 1945), whereas others pertain to places that witnessed mass suffering in living memory (e.g., pilgrimages to Vukovar and Srebrenica). Contrary to the socialist mobilities that were supposed to replace and repress the centuries-long traditions of religious pilgrimages, these new formats were explicitly framed as sacred journeys, while the socialist appeal to South Slav unity and class solidarity gave way to the celebration of ethnically biased historical narratives of new states. However, despite the profoundly ethnocentric orientation of some of these practices, their articulation appears neither militarized nor ludic in comparison to partisan reenactments, opting instead for solemn narratives of martyrdom and victimhood. This change in tone is possibly a reaction to the tragic way in which much of the know-how that had been gained through participation in partisan pilgrimages was applied in practice during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. The morbid irony of history had it that the effort to prepare the civilian population for future battles by reenacting those of the past would find its practical implementation in the destruction of the very sociopolitical system it was supposed to preserve.