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This work by Dubravka Stojanović, Božo Repe is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Dubravka Stojanović, a full professor at the Faculty of Arts in Belgrade and an insightful critic of Serbian society and the Balkans, has recently published a bestselling book The past is coming. In it, she analyses attitudes towards the past, using Serbian textbooks as a case study. Her thesis is that textbooks are not the result of historiography, but one of the vehicles of memory as shaped by the authorities. They use the philosophy of determinism, according to which there are no different choices and paths in history, but a clear path to the goal. Textbooks have also changed the former philosophy of the winners, who try to follow the idea of a new society after victory, into the philosophy of the losers. It has become a self-victimisation from which comes to the thesis that we are surrounded by enemies, that we must first deal with the past, and then we can easily deal with the current social problems. Textbooks have turned history into a weather forecast. Wars, for example, "appear" and spread like rain. There is no one here to prepare, organise, and finance them.
Božo Repe spoke to Dubravka Stojanović.