834707839

STEREOTYPES IN NEW SERBIAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS BETWEEN THE CLASS AND NATIONAL

DETERMINISM

DUBRAYKA STOJANOVIĆ (Belgrade)

Dramatic events in the former Yugoslavia spilled into the Serbian pri-mary-school history textbooks, tuming them into an interesting model for the study of the state of national and historie consciousness. New history textbooks, written sińce the beginning of war in Yugoslavia, are an attempt to adapt the past history to the history that is still unfolding, so that they illustratively point to the elements of national consiousness which are drawn as stereotypes from the past heritage to become politically usable. These stereotypes, combined with a specific system of thought, were raised to the level of ideology and thus, becoming the "national truth", madę war in Yu-goslavia psychologically feasible. That is why, the analysis of Serbian text-books, among other things, helps in understanding what happened to us, how we shifted apparently ąuickly to the militant consciousness of overall des-truction and extermination. They point to a frightening depth of ideological gap, which opened wide, destroying a country and causing priceless loss of human lives. However, I fear that the analysis of these textbooks also wams of what might happen to us in the futurę.

One of the most influential factors in the firm foundations of the Yu-goslav crisis is authoritarian consciousness, which may appear in many ideological forms, often ąuite contradictory. Irrespective of the ideological form it assumes — from the extreme left to the extreme right, it always remains singular, fixed, narrow and eradicates anything that differs from this consciousness. It represents a system of determined thought, in which the mo-tivating force and original cause might be altered as necessary, without chan-ging the essence. It refers to a specific linę of thinking based on aware-ness of a single way, single truth, which thus becomes absolute. This annuls the individual, and the society as the whole. Resulting collectivizing effect looks for support in something abstract, monolithic, which constitutes an organie whole. Nation, as the closest collective identity, often assumes this role. It is given romanticist, irrationally chosen attributes, interpreted as decisive for its "fate". "Fate" determined in such a way in tum determines the "fate" of each individual or group that are implicated in this collective mixture, so that individual becomes subordinate to the collective, thus tur-ning the modem logie upside down. But the problem with textbooks appears when present needs of the nation start to affect historie events that occurred

Rev. Ćtudes Sud-Est Europ., XXXIII, 1—2, p. 49—52, Bucarest, 1995 4—c. 1258