The Youngest Yugoslavs

The last generation of Yugoslavs remembers Yugoslavia fondly but critically. A new oral history book recounts how their youth in the lost country made a lasting impact on their lives.

With Jovana Babović (SUNY Geneseo).

Listen: “The Youngest Yugoslavs” (Episode #131)

Bonus Extras: “The Youngest Yugoslavs” (Episode #131)

Ad-free version of “The Youngest Yugoslavs” (Episode #131).

Transcript: “The Youngest Yugoslavs” (Episode #131)

PETER KORCHNAK: This and every other episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and have access to extended and bonus episodes.

Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join today. 

[JINGLE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your Pioneer, Peter Korchnak.

The last generation of Yugoslavs has already made an appearance on the show. In Episode 71, “The Future of Yugonostalgia,” I spoke with Milica Popović about how the quote unquote “Last Pioneers” remembered Yugoslavia, that is, people born between 1974 and 1982, who were indeed the last cohort of Yugoslav citizens to be members of the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia, aka Tito’s Pioneers.

PETER KORCHNAK: Popović found the cohort commonly remembering happy, ethnic identity-free childhoods in a diverse country with a beautiful sea; life in a safe, secure, relatively abundant, and reasonably well-functioning state that was their home. They share the values of solidarity; anti-materialism; meritocracy; modesty; freedom; critical thinking; social equality and justice; brotherhood and unity; antifascism; and women’s emancipation. 

Access to education and health care, freedom to travel abroad, solidarity and equality and druženje (socializing across borders), peace and stability, owning a house and a summer home, indeed, “having a chance” in life that they had during Yugoslavia is what normality still means to them. They’re not yugonostalgic, they just want a normal life.

MILICA POPOVIĆ: They were referring to yugonostalgia as just sadness for a normal life, and that there is nothing political in it. But with the way I kind of see it was truly how political the definition of what a normal life is. And what a normal life constitutes is fundamentally the way we think as political beings. Because the way we understand which elements need to be satisfied for us to consider our life normal are actually where we stand on the political spectrum.

PETER KORCHNAK: The Last Pioneers’ yugonostalgic memory is anti-nationalist, in opposition to the dominant discourse in their countries, and, strongly favoring socioeconomic equality,they’re against neoliberalism and its capitalist excesses.

In fact, their Yugoslav identities often don’t even contain Yugoslavia, past or potentially resurrected; they simply bring portions of their old identities from that time and place it into today’s context. They simply don’t want who they are and where they’re from to be erased; they want it recognized Yugoslavia existed and had both positive and negative sides. Their country did not disappear, but rather it’s a ruin. They embed their yugonostalgia, the memory and idea how things were, in the present as how things can be done better or how can they be once again. Less nostalgia for the past and more borrowing from the past in search of solutions to the problems of the present.

PETER KORCHNAK: A new book from Indiana University Press corroborates these findings in a different format. 

The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory is a collection of eight interviews with people born in the former Yugoslavia between 1971 and 1991 about their memories of that time and how it made a lasting impact on their lives. It is…

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: …a study of the Yugoslav diaspora, and kind of post-Yugoslav memory of folks both in the region, but then also out of the region. So it’s asking the question to which degree did folks who were children in Yugoslavia now remember Yugoslavia, regardless of whether they live in the region or whether they live abroad.

PETER KORCHNAK: Jovana Babović is the author of The Youngest Yugoslavs. She is an associate professor of history at State University of New York College at Geneseo. I sat down with Babović to see how this cohort has, quote “reconciled the loss of their homeland and how they have continued to find meaning in the Yugoslav past as both a lived experience and as a set of ideals.”

An archival historian by trade, Babović spent the pandemic talking to people in the former Yugoslavia about their memories of that country. And rather than interpret and analyze the stories, the idea was to capture those sparse voices and present the interviews as raw primary sources others can study and analyze.

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: I ended up doing something like 35 or 40 interviews total, and then when I was selecting which ones to include in the book, I wanted to show a diversity of Yugoslavia experiences among the ones that I included in the book. 

And so of the eight interviews that are reproduced, I have four men and four women. I didn’t have any trans or nonbinary folks that I interviewed, but I included folks who were born in different regions of Yugoslavia, so I have folks from every former republic other than Montenegro. I have diversity in where folks live, so about half of them live abroad, about half of them live in the region. And then other elements of diversity too, so like ethnicity of family of origin, class, bilingualism, queerness, parenthood. 

And the interviews that are compiled were intended to be not representative, of course—there’s just as many Yugoslav experiences as there are Yugoslavs—but rather illustrative of the diversity of the Yugoslav experiences.

PETER KORCHNAK: This was probably the easiest interview I’ve done. At the end of The Youngest Yugoslavs, there is a list of ten discussion questions about the contents of the book. So I simply used those to interrogate how these youngest, indeed last, Yugoslavs remembered and perceived their country. 

How do they remember their childhoods? What stands out in their memories? And I really appreciated that your first question in these interviews was, What’s your earliest childhood memory? So I’m totally stealing that…

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: The overwhelming memories that folks I talked to had of their childhoods were really positive. They remember living in neighborhoods. They remember having family around. They remember apartment blocks and cities where they could play outside unsupervised. They felt safe. They had really positive memories of their childhood, and part of that is, they were children, right? They were protected. They were shielded. They had parents who cared for them. And overall, when they think back to those like last decade or decade and a half or so of Yugoslavia, their memories are generally positive. 

Many of them were inaugurated into the Pioneer organization. They remember that, as you know, a step towards membership into this Yugoslav society. Some of them were more excited about those memories than others, but many of them remembered friends, communities, like a sense of neighborliness, neighborliness that really prevailed in their hometowns or in the cities where they lived. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Age or birth year cutoffs can be analytically tricky, of course. A person born in 1974 had different experiences in many ways than someone born in 1984, one having been a Pioneer, for example, the other just missing that window. Combining different generations into a single narrative, on the other hand, makes for interesting comparisons within the sample. 

Either way, for all of the interlocutors in The Young Yugoslavs, the other side of the childhood coin was of course the collapse of Yugoslavia.

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: For some, that meant experiencing war first hand. For others, it meant experiencing the remnants of war, like sort of the the aftershocks of war, which meant poverty, which meant arrival of refugees, which meant for some dislocation, for some, that meant having to flee their homelands. 

And so while they’re really positive in their memories of like the 70s and 80s, they’re very critical of Yugoslav wars. They’re also very critical of the postsocialist transition. A lot of them, by then had become young adults, and they saw nationalism growing in successor states. They saw the poverty and the struggle of post-socialist society. And, you know, they contrasted that with the memories of their childhood. 

And a lot of them often asked, you know, why didn’t I get to live the Yugoslavia that was promised? You know, they mourned, in many ways, the loss of that world that could have been so I think it’s a bittersweet kind of memory, right, of their childhoods. It’s a memory that of a positive childhood, but a childhood that never actually reached fruition. They didn’t get to be adults in Yugoslavia. They didn’t get to live out that world that had been promised to them.

PETER KORCHNAK: What was the Yugoslavia that was promised to them? What do they remember that was Yugoslavia that was promised to them that they’re expected to live in as teenagers, adults and so on.

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: You know, for many of these folks who are now educated, who are now thoughtful about Yugoslavia’s history, they don’t necessarily ignore the fact that Yugoslavia did collapse. They don’t ignore the problems. Many of them, in fact, bring up things like racism or discrimination, economic problems. You know, they understand politics, nationalism.

But the things that they, I think, wish they could have had, and the things that they are most wistful for, the things that they’re remembering as the ideals of Yugoslavia are those pillars of socialism and multinationalism. So, you know, they often mention the idea of like equality, the idea of unity, the idea of solidarity, cooperation. 

They weren’t necessarily ignoring the fact that those ideals were not realized, but the promises of those ideals, right? That the things that Yugoslavia was in theory based on, in theory working towards is the ideals that they really look to as inspiration for, like they could have had. 

And then there’s also, like more concrete things. A lot of folks spoke about the opportunities for education that their parents received, housing, healthy balance of work, life hours. A lot of folks had these kind of experiences they saw their parents and older siblings live through, and they thought that that that was going to be something that they were going to inherit as it matured, as it improved, right? So these kind of captivating visions for the future were a world that was diverse and a world that was building towards a brotherhood and unity, and a world that was, in theory, taking Yugoslavs towards like a brighter future, right? 

And those were the promises. Nobody that I spoke to, you know, believed that that was the actual reality. But those were the promises and the ideals that they were raised with, and I think that they wanted to believe in. And today, when I’d speak with these folks, I think the satisfaction they have in neoliberal world today, far and near the region, makes them look back to these Yugoslav ideals as pillars of a world they would like to see still today.

PETER KORCHNAK: Slavoj Žižek has said that nostalgia is a longing for an unrealized future, for the past’s “hidden, non-realized potentials.” Later on we’ll learn the people interviewed in The Young Yugoslavs aren’t necessarily nostalgic; their feelings and views are more nuanced and complicated. But others have also noted, and this is my point here, that what disappeared with Yugoslavia the country was the future its people were working towards and building, the future orientation and common, victorious outlook the society had. Which starkly contrasts with the past orientation today, the glorification of the particularistic past, of national golden ages, of past traumas and losses and victimhood.

Moving on.

How did these folks perceive differences among their friends, classmates, family members, community members? What was their lived experience, or memory rather in this case, about that? 

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: I asked that question specifically, because I really wanted to be aware of to what degree difference mattered, right? And in a way, if Yugoslav deals were fully realized, difference would not matter, right? It would just be we are, all, you know, equal in our brotherhood. 

But the funny thing is, people did remember a difference, right? They often would say something like, we were all equal, but then they would think back and remember that, you know, almost everyone had one or two or several Roma classmates who were always marginalized from their friend groups, marginalized by teachers. 

One person, her interview is not in the book, but she remembered that teachers, for example, were very mean towards students with disabilities, right? And didn’t necessarily treat them equally. 

Folks were also aware of class differences. They were aware of people who had more and people who had less. As children, many of them mentioned, you know, being aware of those who were from different regions, right if someone moved from Bosnia to Slovenia, kids were aware of those differences, and so they were raised with the ideals right of brotherhood and equality, but also they lived in a complex world that included family, family members, that included teachers, that included right? I was shifting sociopolitical world around them, and so difference did actually play a part but the implication is that those things would have continued to matter even in adulthood.

PETER KORCHNAK: So how did they identify at the time of their childhood, at the time of Yugoslavia? Or how did they remember identifying, in any case?

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: At the time, you know, I think many of them were raised within Yugoslavia, and many of them had the sense of belonging to a Yugoslav culture. 

However, a lot of folks were not necessarily from families or from regions where they felt included in Yugoslavia. So for instance, a lot of like the border regions, like folks I talked to in Slovenia or folks I talked to in Vojvodina, often had other forms of identity. So in the book, there’s an interview with someone who is ethnically Hungarian who lived in Yugoslavia. And for her right, she says, “I’m Hungarian from Vojvodina,” and that’s how she identified at the time. She grew up bilingual. And so her Hungarian entity stood side by side with like the Yugoslav one, and that Yugoslav was less Yugoslav more regional, right, or more like based in the city where she lived. And then same thing for folks who lived in Slovenia. And the interview that I have in there right there was a clear sense of Slovene, because Slovenian is different than, you know, Serbo-Croatian, the dominant language. 

And so the idea that somebody can be multiple things, I think, is like, really beautiful. And I love that actually, about many of these folks’ childhoods. Many of them grew up with opportunities to learn other languages in school. Many of them grew up with the opportunity to be bilingual. Many of them grew up with the sense that they didn’t have to just be Yugoslav. In fact, they didn’t even have to be Yugoslav if they didn’t want to. Many of them were, of course, but I love that, the expansiveness of that Yugoslav identity. And I think that’s what allows folks today to kind of challenge the successor state nationalism.

Some folks today did kind of espouse, you know, the sort of nation state that they were born in, or rather the nation state in which they were inherited into. They espouse that national identity. But not everyone. Some people say they are multiple things now, some people have hyphenated, some people reject the national category altogether. And I think that’s the inheritance of having grown up in Yugoslavia, where you could be multiple things.

PETER KORCHNAK: Was there a way that people remembered socialism, the socialist part of their childhood, of their experience, and what did they remember specifically?

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: The socialist part really came from the social mobility that a lot of folks experienced through their families. So many people remembered that their parents were the first generation to go to college or move to urban spaces. So many of them remember that their parents’ generation was the first to live in apartments, to receive, right, housing from the state. And so the memories of socialism actually are, like, quite positive, insofar as socialism has benefited their families, and as a result, had benefited them. I cannot tell you how many people I talked to who said, Yugoslavia gave my, you know, parent, an opportunity to study in a city at a university, it gave my parent an opportunity to receive a job as a result. You know, I grew up with privileges that I would not have had otherwise. 

And so socialism, in many ways, they viewed, a lot of folks I spoke to, viewed as something that benefited them greatly and something that they missed. Especially those who live in the post-Yugoslav world and the successor states, they see failing health care, they see, you know, like disastrous housing policies, they see massive hierarchies growing in terms of class, and that doesn’t sit well with them. And this is where I think they look back at that Yugoslav socialism in particular, as something that was moving towards like a healthier social path.

PETER KORCHNAK: Let’s get to the disintegration. How do they remember that specific period? How did they experience the collapse of the state, and how did they experience the ensuing wars?

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: Everyone who I spoke to lived through the Yugoslavia wars in some capacity, and so the war was defining of their childhood and the war was defining of their memory of Yugoslavia—that’s the last memory that they have of that state, when it was still one entity. 

And I think it’s really important that Yugoslavia collapsed while they were still like young adults. So they never reached maturity in Yugoslavia. They never had jobs, they never went to college, never had families that they formed of their own. And so war was so, so, so important in defining their memories of Yugoslavia, because it disappeared.

Every single young Yugoslav lost their homeland. Some of them lost like their homes as well. So some folks that I talked to lived in regions where there was war and they fled. There was one person who I interviewed, who was from Bosnia, who ended up going abroad, first to Serbia and then later to the Czech Republic. There were other folks who I spoke to who ended up emigrating out even of Serbia. There was a person I interviewed in the book whose family left because they perceived life, everyday life in Serbia to be too dangerous during the transition, so they left, and they moved to Greece, and then she eventually ended up in the United States. 

But their memories of war are horrific, right? You’re a child, you’re watching [the] Yugoslav war that is very much televised. You are experiencing either war itself, so you know, Sarajevo under siege or fleeing, or you are experiencing war through air raid shelter practice runs, or you’re experiencing war through poverty or the arrival of refugees from other regions. 

And so everyone that I spoke to had really strong memories of hearing about the wars, seeing them on television, knowing either relatives or family members or friends who had in some capacity either been conscripted or involved, and so this impacted them deeply. And I think they’re very critical of the fact that Yugoslavia disintegrated into this kind of like violent affair. But it is nevertheless like memory that’s like deeply ingrained in them. 

And I think that’s the memory that effectively like shifts them from being nostalgic or only nostalgic about their childhood, but also pushes them into being critical, right? 

That war was kind of like a wake up call. They don’t have the option to just be nostalgic about Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s dissolution essentially forces them into understanding that state as good, but then also not so good, and that, I think, gets these folks to think critically about the past.

PETER KORCHNAK: How do they—to use your terminology—how do they engage with those successor states, whichever they are, and if you know, yeah, and wherever they live? Tell me a little bit about that post-Yugoslav, postwar experience of these folks.

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: About half the people who are included in the book, and about half the people who I spoke to live in the region today, many of them have left and come back. So the choice to live there is a choice. 

Everyone that I was focusing on in this project was very globally mobile, educated and was able to leave. And many of the folks who are in the region today were abroad, whether in the U.S. or Europe or elsewhere, for school, for education, and so they came back willingly, because there was something pulling them back, right? This is their home, after all. 

It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily just accepting of it. Those folks have perspective on, certainly the war, but also have perspective on, like, different societal practices, and so the folks who are in the region are critical, are mindful, seeing some positives and seeing lots and lots of negatives, especially in things like housing and healthcare, education that we talked about. 

The folks who are living abroad also are drawn to the region, and almost everyone I talked to says they go back in some capacity, whether it’s, you know, to visit family members, whether it’s to collaborate on projects. And so they’re involved, because I think they have that pull, not necessarily always, to return, to settle, but to interact and engage with the region. 

And I think that’s the sort of question I know you’re going to ask me eventually, which is, how do they identify today? They identify, I think, very much with Yugoslavia, right? Which is why I think they’re pulled to it, not necessarily the way their parents are, right, or sort of that older generation, which, you know, we often think of as like sitting on their suitcases waiting to come back and resume their old life. But these folks are looking at the region as a region that is moving into the future. 

I find so much creativity and so much inspiring work among former Yugoslavs across the world, and I think the fact that they are engaged with the region today is the thing that you know makes us excellent, and that goes from like sports to music to film to literature. There’s so many good folks out there. 

And in many ways, the silver lining of this massive displacement that Yugoslavs experienced was that Yugoslavs are everywhere now, right? It’s so much easier to come across a Yugoslav novelist, or former Yugoslav novelist, musician, filmmaker, creator, or otherwise, but they are engaged with the region as well. And I like that, I like that as a positive aspect of this globalizing world we live in.

PETER KORCHNAK: Wonderful! “Yugoslavs are everywhere,” a quote for the ages. 

Now, there’s a word that you used when you were describing these folks’ recollections or evaluations of socialist Yugoslavia and of the post-Yugoslav condition, and that was the word critical. How does that figure into their experiences, memories, and so on, the current condition?

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: I frame their memories, the memories of this youngest Yugoslav generation, as critical memories, because I wanted to differentiate it from just mere nostalgia, right? Nostalgia is looking at the past and imagining a world that never really was, right. Nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym defined it, can either be reflective or it can be restorative, but it’s always imagining a past that we’ve reconstructed, right, and a past that wasn’t really truly like that. So a nostalgic memory would be, “my childhood was perfect, everyone was equal, and it was great.” 

A critical memory, and the way that I framed the memories of this young Yugoslav generation, is, “my childhood was really good, right? I had neighborliness, I had a community. However, I’m also aware that not all my classmates were treated equally. I’m also now remembering that I alongside 10 million other Yugoslavs lost their homeland. I’m also understanding now that not everyone had the same opportunities that had been promised to, in theory, all of us.” 

And so that “critical” doesn’t necessarily mean they are negative only, but rather that they’re reflective, that they are thinking about the positives, and kind of understanding that their childhoods were good, partially because they were children, but partially because they were good, but also that their childhoods weren’t perfect, and that Yugoslavia had ideals that weren’t realized, that Yugoslavia made promises to its citizens that never came to be or that weren’t actually put into literal practice. 

And so that critical memory, for me, is a way to acknowledge and honor the fact that these folks are thinking deeply about Yugoslavia and looking at a fuller picture than if they were just remembering and reminiscing about favorite foods or favorite TV shows or, you know, childhood games. They’re giving us a bigger scope, and a resultI think, a more comprehensive understanding of how Yugoslavia impacted them in their lives today.

PETER KORCHNAK: In closing this, I’m going to combine the number eight and number 10 here, and that is, what did Yugoslavia mean to interviewees at the time of the interviews, three decades since the collapse of the unified state? That’s number eight and number 10, the last one is, What value did interviewees find in Yugoslavia and its ideals? 

JOVANA BABOVIĆ: For many of the folks that I spoke to Yugoslavia was this dream state that never was right. It was a future that they never got to live, and it means to them the multi the ability to have multiple identities. It means that there is an ideal of equality and inclusivity and unity. 

And many of the folks I spoke to, when I asked them how they identified, many of them chose this identity of post-Yugoslav or Yugoslav still in some capacity. And I think the affinity that they feel towards Yugoslavia is the affinity towards the promises that could have been, right, the promises of living in a neighborhood, of having a healthy work life balance, of having a free education, of having a job that is just one part of your life, as opposed to, like the center core of what we do in many, you know, capitalist countries. 

And folks who really embraced either Yugoslav or post-Yugoslav identities, I think, wanted to preserve that sense of origin. They wanted to preserve the fact that Yugoslavia shaped them with who they are. It gave them these ideals. It gave them these blueprints for what a future could be if it was realized as such. And I think it also gave them the freedom to kind of be flexible in their identity. 

Very few people I talked to sided with an identity that was, you know, I’m Serbian or Croatian. Many of them either had hyphenated identities or leaned into this Yugoslav, post-Yugoslav. 

There was a person I interviewed, you know, who said, I reject the question. I you know, I’m just an anarchist. There was a person who said, you know, I’m a global citizen. I’m just a human being. 

And so I think the sort of internalized ability that we are more than just one thing, that we can be multiple and that we deserve better, is what Yugoslavia had meant to them. And I think that’s the value, the big, big value that many of them carry into the future today.

PETER KORCHNAK: Beautiful.

PETER KORCHNAK: The Youngest Yugoslavs is out now at IUPress.org.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.

Also at Yugoblok, listen to the ad-free version of this and every other episode. Become a member today. Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!