Remembering the War: Mediatized History and the Negotiation for a Modern Croatian National Identity

Sa？etak Using narrative inquiry and discourse analysis on a sample of a segment of the television program TV Kalendar, this paper studies the case of mediatized construction, as well as the function of collective history by way of public broadcasting. A thesis is brought forward, stating that a contemporary nation, as a modern sociopolitical entity of an “imagined community” cannot exist without representation in the media. The segments include episodes of Croatian history from the time of the war, 1991 to 1995, shown on the show. The TV Kalendar program is next shown to invent myths and write history that is subsequently used to define identity and political legitimacy in the here and now. The paper is a critique of public broadcasting, whose method of depiction of past events does not contribute to the democratic construction of collective memory, a key segment of collective identity formation in all social communities, but instead, contributes to a memory of the war that encourages discord and collective disregard in a post-conflict society