This book sets out with an impressive goal: to cover the entirety of the musealization of the Second World War in Yugoslavia (from 1945 onwards) and in today's Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and Serbia. Therefore, not only the time frame but also the geographical, memory, and museum space covered are enormous. With this comprehensive approach, the study is part of an ongoing interest in musealization processes of the Second World War as a mode for analysing memory cultures and memory politics, especially in Eastern Europe, during the past 10–15 years. While first publications focused on smaller numbers of museum case studies,1 recent projects – of which the present book is part – aim to provide analyses and insights that are representative of societies and countries as a whole.2

The specific take of Nataša Jagdhuhn “is not [to look] on the museum as an institution, but rather on museality as a product and reflection of interwoven relations between society, institutions, and heritage” (p. 6), as well as consider three countries simultaneously by applying a crossregional comparative perspective (p. 5). Taking the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the armed conflicts of the first half of the 1990s as the central turning point, she traces processes of changes, redefinition, and adjustment – that is to say, “fractures in the Second World War museal narrative” (p. 6) in the three post-Yugoslav states. Her book provides an entangled discussion of the changes in the legal, organizational, and financial, as well as the connected political and interpretative frameworks that shaped museums, memorial houses, and memorial sites since 1945 while still providing glimpses into individual museums and exhibitions.

The book is structured into two parts. The first part, comprising two chapters, focuses on the period 1945–1990 as well as the development of the official Yugoslav war narrative and its institutionalization. The first chapter covers the legislation regulating museum work and its ideological orientation, the beginning of collecting activities for the newly founded museums and memorial sites, and an emerging “ranking” of historical events that lay the foundation for an institutional hierarchy within the museumscape. This classification mirrored the official interpretation of the period 1941–1945. The highest priority was given to the political history of the country – that is to say, the history of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). This focus led to the establishment of museums on the sites of central events or decisions of the KPJ on its wartime route through the country. The second priority was given to “memorial parks” – museums on the sites of battle. Places of civilian mass suffering, such as concentration camps, were designated as a third priority. Based on these distinctions, the second chapter introduces the museum types structuring this memoryscape: the “Museums of the Revolution”, which “sought to musealise the specific historical circumstances that made the Yugoslav revolution unique“ (p. 44), and the “People’s Liberation Struggle Museums”, which are located on original sites of battle and suffering and serve an important ceremonial purpose as places of mass commemoration events. The chapter then focuses on the development of curatorial presentation strategies as well as perceptions of historical objects and museum artifacts in this work. Lastly, the chapter presents an excursus into the development of the museological theory in Yugoslavia, observing that while museum practitioners relied heavily on the Soviet model as well as Czechoslovak museological thinking, the academic community acknowledged and was open to museological theories of Western scholars.

The second part of the book, comprising three chapters and the book’s conclusion, begins with a chapter describing in detail the changes within the world war narratives of the societies and politics in the three countries during the 1990s wars, with a focus on the devastating impact the fighting on the ground had on museums as well as their collections and exhibitions. The following chapter then concentrates on a comparative analysis of the narrative developments that museums and exhibitions underwent. As Jagdhuhn rightly states, the central changes she observed, described as “curatorial interventions” (p. 147), could be found in many Eastern European countries at the time. One intervention aimed especially at the elimination of communist ideological interpretations in displays and of their ethnonational reframing. At the same time, as another invervention, many exhibitions kept their original form, with only a few receiving new sections as additions to the existing narratives. The question of how far such actions constitute conscious curatorial choices as a means of self-reflection of the institutions’ history is discussed at length here. Specific to the post-Yugoslav situation in all the three countries analysed, a third curatorial intervention is named: the inclusion of references between the Second World War and the 1990s wars, linking the founding myth surrounding the years 1941–1945 to the individual national struggles of the present. The last topical chapter in this part has a closer look at selected individual museums in each country: the Jasenovac Memorial in Croatia, the Museum of the 21 October in Serbia, and the Museum of Old Herzegovina as well as the Museum of the Second AVNOJ Session in BiH.

The results collected in this study are manifold and certainly offer a deep insight into the development of the museumscape of this region. The areas of interest covered are broad, ranging from the institutional history of museums, individual exhibition analyses, and the discussion of theoretical settings of various processes observed to the presentation of statewide developments in politics, memory cultures, and legal settings. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that not every argument presented seems equally convincing. One example is the use of the term “metamuseum”: while used in the book’s title and thus given a central position, it is hardly employed in the following analyses, appearing only twice throughout the entire study – the first time only in chapter 5 (p. 167). It appears that during the writing process the term was replaced with what is coined “broken museality” – a concept that seems to have been the initial and long-lasting point of departure for the study, also named as such in the introduction (p. 6), with an entire chapter devoted to it (chapter 4). As the field of museum and exhibition analyses is a young one, it would have been interesting to read a short introduction into the methods applied by the author. At the same time, a lacking presentation of methods is not uncommon within the field.

Notes:
1 See, e.g., Zuzanna Bogumił et. al, The Enemy on Display. The Second World War in Eastern European Museums, Oxford 2015.; Ekaterina Makhotina et al. (ed.), Krieg im Museum. Präsentationen des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Museen und Gedenkstätten des östlichen Europa, Göttingen 2015.
2 One recent example is Ljiljana Radonić, Der Zweite Weltkrieg in postsozialistischen Gedenkmuseen. Geschichtspolitik zwischen der „Anrufung Europas“ und dem Fokus auf „unser“ Leid, Berlin 2021. See also Ekaterina Makhotina, Erinnerungen an den Krieg – Krieg der Erinnerungen. Litauen und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Göttingen 2017.