Do the Dictatorships Ever End? Historians and Publishers under the Dictatorship in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

• Published in: History in Flux 2023-02, Vol.4 (4), p.113-135
• Main Author: Janković, Branimir
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2706-414X; 2706-4441
• DOI: 10.32728/flux.2022.4.5

The theme of the paper are the ways in which the dictatorship of King Alexander influenced the politics of history, the educational system, historians, publishers of historical literature, and publishers in general in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In order to put this first dictatorship in the Yugoslav area in a diachronic perspective, I will analyze the presence of certain types of continuities and discontinuities. I will also show the trajectories of historians and publishers during King Alexanderʼs dictatorship and other dictatorships which followed in the 20th century’s Age of Extremes. Moreover, all these dictatorships inevitably referred to each other. I will also explore the contemporary attitude toward the first dictatorship in the Yugoslav area, the attitude which was shaped by the stance toward Serbo-Croatian conflicts and Yugoslavism as a whole. All this contributed to the constant presence of this dictatorship in the ongoing symbolic struggles over the interpretation of national history.