chapter 12 How Does This Monument Make You Feel? Measuring Emotional Responses to War Memorials in Croatia Vjeran Pavlaković and Benedikt Perak Since the collapse of communism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, collective remembrance in all of the successor states has undergone dramatic transformations as part of nation-building projects and strategies to bolster the legitimacy of new political elites. This has included nationalist revision- ism of the narratives of the Second World War and the creation of founding myths based on the bloody wars accompanying Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Al- though there is a general agreement across the political spectrum regarding the dominant nation-building narrative in Croatia, which emphasizes its vic- tory in the War of Independence (known as the Domovinski rat, or Homeland War, 1991–1995), there is considerably less consensus over the Second World War.1 This so-called ‘red-black ideological division’ in society is manifested in seemingly perpetual politicized debates over communist Partisans, fascist Ustaša, and Serb extremist Četniks, which is then additionally distorted by the more recent traumas of the 1990s conflict. The need for unity during the Homeland War led to the policy of ‘national reconciliation’ under the first Cro- atian president, Franjo Tuđman, which emphasized the struggle for statehood as one of the goals of the Croatian Partisans and concurrently whitewashed the Ustaša movement of its fascist ideology. The long-term consequences were the demonization of the antifascist struggle and the rehabilitation of Nazi- fascist collaborators, which was played out across the country’s memoryscape: thousands of Partisan memorials have been damaged or completely destroyed 1 The results of the research project “Symbolic Strategies of Nation-building in the Western Balkans,” which included a detailed opinion poll that posed questions about both the Sec- ond World War and the Homeland War, showed that the majority of respondents in Croatia held the official narrative of the latter to reflect the truth, while interpretations of the former were considerably polarized. The complete results of the opinion poll are available at http:// cultstud.ffri.hr/istrazivanje/projekti/118-symbolic-strategies. See also Vjeran Pavlaković, “Fulfilling the Thousand-Year-Old Dream: Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in Croatia”, in Pål Kolstø, ed., Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). © Vjeran Pavlaković and Benedikt Perak, ���7 | doi �0.��63/978900435�353_0�3 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc-by-ncVjeran Pavlaković License. and Benedikt Perak - 9789004352353 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:40:33AM via free access <UN> Measuring Emotional Responses to War Memorials in Croatia 269 since 1991, while new monuments and public spaces have been dedicated to some of Hitler’s most fervent allies. The victorious and emancipatory narrative of antifascism has slowly been replaced with an anti-communist victimization discourse perpetuated through commemorative practices at various sites of memory. Croatia’s efforts to join the European Union has meant that since 2000, its administrations have had to adopt the transnational narratives of antifascist founding myths, resulting in the partial revalorization of the Partisan struggle. Right-wing political parties have also adopted the eu discourse on the Second World War, although by condemning communist crimes, and they have sought to equate all totalitarian systems through eu memorial days such as the Day of Remembrance for Victims of all Authoritarian and Totalitarian Regimes (23 August). After Croatia was admitted to the eu on 1 July 2013, many political ob- servers and scholars predicted that the bitter polemics over the Second World War would play a minor role compared to the burning socio-economic issues plaguing the country. However, since the eu accession, symbolic politics cen- tred on interpretations of the Second World War, as well as renewed debates on the Homeland War, have continued to dominate headlines and divide the political elites at a time when a unified strategy for resolving the economic crisis has been most needed. The election of a short-lived right-wing coalition in 2016 exacerbated the red-black division, particularly over cultural policies, memory politics and commemorative practices. Previous research presented at conferences related to cost action IS1203 (In search of transnational memory in Europe) has traced the top-down strategies of rehabilitating the Ustaša in post-1990 Croatia, transnational eu discourse in Croatian memory politics and collective remembrance of com- munism.2 The challenge, however, is how to measure the reception of these various stages of reframing the past. As a part of the project ‘Framing the Nation and Collectiv e Identity in Croatia: Cultural Memory of 20th Century Traumas,’3 this chapter seeks to analyze to what degree perceptions of past 2 “Remembering War the European Way: Croatia’s Commemorative Culture and the eu”, eu Politics of Memory Conference, European University Institute, Florence, Italy (20 June 2015); “eu Narratives and the Specter of Communism in Croatia,” cost Conference – Memory of Communism in Europe, Paris, France (15–16 May 2014); and “Creating Victims out of Per- petrators: Symbolic Strategies of Rehabilitating World War Two Collaborators in Croatia since the 1990s,” cost meeting Social Construction of Guilt and Victimhood, Krakow, Poland (16 September 2013). 3 This project is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (hrzz – Hrvatska zaklada za znanost). Vjeran Pavlaković and Benedikt Perak - 9789004352353 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:40:33AM via free access <UN> 270 Pavlaković and Perak wars are shaped by commemorative practices, monuments, political speeches and media representations of political rituals. Drawing upon the material gathered at several commemorations (including video footage of speeches, photographs of monuments and media coverage), our goal was to develop a survey to measure emotional responses to a controversial Second World War memorial in Croatia. We wanted to measure firstly the reaction to a decon- textualized visual representationof the monument and secondly measure the response to the same representation but this time contextualized with various commemorative speeches imbuing the static monument with conceptualiza- tions of meaning. The selected monument – along with a memorial complex, archive and museum – commemorates the notorious concentration camp of Jasenovac established by the Ustaša regime in the Independent State of Croatia (ndh – Nezavisna Država Hrvatska). An increasingly vocal group of right-wing historians, journalists and politicians has sought to erase, or at least radically redefine, the narratives associated with this site of memory by questioning the number of victims and rehabilitating the perpetrators. The memorial already underwent a transformation in meaning during the shift from socialist Yugo- slavia to independent Croatia, and the latest efforts to undermine the accepted historical narrative are representedby an attempt to inscribe alternative mean- ings in line with right-wing interpretations of the Second World War. In the midst of this cacophony of state-promoted narratives and revisionist counter- narratives bordering on conspiracy theories, is it possible to determine how Croatian society perceives this dark episode from the 20th century? One of the important questions in the research of the collective memory is the influence of the emotional and cognitive dimensions in the mechanism of social memory transmission. How successfully are the subjective qualities of the individual memories transmitted and elicited in the inter-subjective communication? What are the salient emotional and cognitive features of the narration that successfully construct a socially shared memory? Can we mea- sure the level of affective and cognitive engagement of the receivers of the representations of the cultural memories prominent in social communication and media? Can we predict the behavioural and pragmatic tendencies based on the level of emotional and cognitive appraisal? Can we correlate the level of emotional and cognitive appraisal with the representation of a particular event in a collective memory? This chapter tackles some of the abovemen- tioned questions by investigating the effects of a monument’s representations, associated commemorative speeches, and media coverage on the individual’s affective and cognitive stance about the traumatic events in Croatian collective memory. In order to formulate the reception of this multimodal representation we situate the present study on the collective memory within the theor etical Vjeran Pavlaković and Benedikt Perak - 9789004352353 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:40:33AM via free access <UN> Measuring Emotional Responses to War Memorials in Croatia 271 framework of embodied cognition,4 cognitive linguistics approaches to the conceptualization of social identity,5 cultural linguistics notion of socially dis- tributed cognition6 and componential appraisal theory of emotion.7 This theoretical framework implies that the construction of a commemo- rative event establishes socially distributed conceptualization networks that can involve several (conflicting) conceptualizing models.8 In other words, the same event can be construed differently by profiling different frames, re- sulting in specific