Authors

Discussion

This paper proposes to focus on the examination of the role and implications of fun for participants of the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle (Narodnooslobodilačka borba, NOB). Exploring the relevance of fun in war may strike some people as trivializing human suffering. This paper, however, aims to tackle the plurality of experiences and affective grammars that are usually neglected by the exclusive focus on violence and destruction. In the words of Kate McLoughlin, “each war has its own poesis” (2011, 10), and can only be understood through the broadest and the most complex assemblages of emotions and imagination available (Malešević 2021; Pentinnen 2013). This paper will attend to the so-called cultural-educational work (kulturno-prosvjetni rad) in the communist-led NOB during the Second World War. Although communist media and art are usually defined solely in terms of agitation and propaganda, this case study argues that the wartime entertainment always relied on the artists’ creative potential and inclinations and accepted the importance of entertainment for all who found themselves in the vortex war. It proposes to outline some of the preliminary findings of the ongoing resarch and indicate how the mentioned elements intertwined into a (relatively) successful officially sanctioned system of motivation, that is to say, production of fun.