UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

[We have scattered around the world like .../we have travelled the sky by/Were
these really better days, or is it us that were better?/We used to fraternise
.../Supposing we‘re dreaming the same dream/And the god didn‘t care whether we
cross ourselves or bow]
SpAcE126 264
As seen from the above comments, the responses to this video range from positive to negative
evaluations of both ‗intended‘ reading of the song (the NATO bombings) and the ‗delusive‘
reading seeing in this video a ‗commemoration‘ of the socialist Yugoslavia. But for most of the
commentators responding to the video it seems they inadvertently/unconsciously refer to the
former Yugoslavia and write from the position of at least some personal or first-hand experience.
In any case, there still seem to be also more distanced voices that express utter confusion over the
past, and the debates this past fuels twenty years after the collapse:
I‘m born in ‘87. This period really is engraved in my head. The too long 1993. it
seems it lasted an eternity. I don‘t even know whether I have anything to be sorry
for. I feel hatred and nostalgia at the same time. And they say it was all great :(
steffanKM 265
This last comment—expressing both hate and nostalgia (clearly a second-hand, mediated one)—
demonstrates that the post-Yugoslav wars instilled both contempt and appreciation. The former is
probably mostly a result of a scarred childhood. The hatred seems to be a somewhat
undesired/inappropriate feeling precisely because the nostalgic discourse in many post-Yugoslav
societies and emigrant communities alike, is often very explicit. But it fails to explicate the
complexity (if it can allude to senselessness) of what was going on at the time of the country‘s
collapse.
This, however, is not where the life of the Russian song in user generated videos ends: the search
yields several more cases that use an elaborate approach in terms of narrativisation. Interestingly,
none of them explicitly relates the song to the NATO bombings: rather the makers seem to
interpret the song in terms of loss of Yugoslavia and also create their videos along these lines. The
following two, in which commenting function has been disabled, establish an intriguing
communication between each other.
The video ―Tatu – Jugoslavija‖ created by user mejerchold had 286,370 views in May 2011. 266
The video starts off with a twilight shot of a river and a city in the background (Danube?
Belgrade?) and cuts abruptly to a scene of Dubrovnik shelling at the beginning of the war in
Croatia in 1991. Thus, at the very beginning the digital memorial maker clearly delimits the object
264 Ibid.
265 Ibid.
266 Mejerchold, ―Tatu – Jugoslavija,‖ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Git1piHts, accessed 2 September 2011.
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