Max Bergholz. Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community.

Forum: Theoretical Concepts of Shaping the Memory, edited by Sabina Ferhadbegović and Katerina Králová

“…Such groups had a local purview and initially steered clear from attacking Axis troops instead focussing on their local enemies, Bosniak and Croatian nationalist militias. 21 Boundaries, ideological beliefs and allegiances were no less uncertain within the resistance ranks. In his memoir, Milovan Djilas notes how peasant communities in his native Montenegro constantly changed allegiances to placate the strongmen of the day and further their local and personal agendas, sometimes aligning and other times opposing the partisan forces.…”

Victims, perpetrators, and bystanders: Atrocity and its aftermath in the films of Jasmila Žbanić

“…In Grbavica, it is the secondary victimization (see, e.g. Němec 2022) experienced by Esma as the mother of a child conceived in rape; Amar's turn to a fundamentalist form of Islam in Na Putu is indicative of how violence and identity interact (Bergholz 2016); in Za one, Kym confronts denial (Cohen 2001) and in Qu Vadis, Aida? the role of bystanders in atrocity (Hilberg 1993) is brought to the fore, primarily through the presence of the UN as the genocidal massacre unfolds.…”

1923 and the legacies of genocide

“…In addition to eradicating the Ottoman Christian community, genocide was also a means of reorienting the Muslim population to a new ideological identity 1 . As historian Max Bergholz aptly puts ‘[T]he violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism’ (2016, p. 6). Destruction of the non‐Muslim community went parallel with the process of the birth of new modern Turkey, its bourgeoisie, the rise of the violent middle class, and people who rose up to the social ladder not because they owned the means of production but because they confiscated them.…”