A forthcoming article by Mempoppers Jernej Kaluža and Natalija Majsova will be published in Social Science Forum / Družboslovne razprave as part of a special issue (September 2025) on new approaches to memory studies. What happens when we try to disentangle Tito's political figure from its pop icon status? Are nostalgic sentiments truly tied, almost universally, to remembering one's youth? To explore these questions, their article employs a big-data perspective on autobiographical memory.

You might think the story of Tito and Yugoslavia has already been told a thousand times. And it’s true: Mitja Velikonja has written about Titostalgia, Sanja Lazarević Radak described Tito as a folkloric trickster, and Tamara Pavasović Trošt unpacked his image in post-Yugoslav societies. Others, like Tanja Petrović, Monika Palmberger, and Alison Landsberg, showed how memory, politics, and culture are all tied up in Yugoslavia’s legacy.  

A forthcoming article by Mempoppers Jernej Kaluža and Natalija Majsova, soon to be published in Social Science Forum / Družboslovne razprave as part of a special issue on new approaches to memory studies (forthcoming in September 2025, co-edited by Gal Kirn and Natalija Majsova) adds to this rich field of research by taking a distinct approach: mixed-methods analysis of a large-scale, structured corpus of memory interviews with people born between 1940 and 1955. This big-data perspective on autobiographical memory makes it possible to trace how memories are embedded in the everyday language of people and how they evolve across life stages, media environments, and personal narratives. At the same time, it offers a distinctly grounded understanding of cultural phenomena such as Titostalgia, the transformation of memories in times of transition, and the complex interplay between collective and individual remembrance. Here are some key insights from the study. 

The corpus

You are probably curious about how we got access to all these memories. In fact, it was a major collective endeavour, facilitated by several generations of cooperative students. Over six years, journalism students at the University of Ljubljana (under the mentorship of Jernej Amon Prodnik) sat down with people born between 1940 and 1955 (usually their grandparents) and asked them about media use in socialist Yugoslavia. The result is a remarkable archive of 179 one-hour interviews.  

Memory on media use also triggered many other themes: how much they trusted journalism, and how they experienced Yugoslav society across different stages of life — from childhood and youth to middle age and later years. Because the interviews span such a large and diverse sample, they capture both the intimacy of personal memories and the broader patterns of collective remembrance. To make sense of this massive dataset, we combined close reading and thematic coding with digital tools like text mining, word frequency analysis, and sentiment analysis. This way, we could zoom in on individual stories while also seeing the bigger picture. 

The content

We found that people remember Tito and Yugoslavia in diverse and often contradictory ways, but not in a random or chaotic fashion. Interestingly, their memories tend to cluster into three broad “modes,” almost like different lenses through which the past is seen and felt. Those three modes correspond to a certain extent with different life-periods of interviews (although they cannot be reduced to them):  

• Modern memories mostly come from childhood and youth. In this mode, Tito appears as the great unifier, a leader of progress, security, and optimism. People remember listening to the radio or gathering around the TV to see him, taking part in rituals like the Štafeta mladosti (Relay of Youth), and feeling proud to belong to a collective project. These stories are filled with warmth and a sense of shared purpose.
• Postmodern memories set in after Tito’s death in 1980. Here, the once-stable narrative breaks apart. Interviewees recall the shock of his passing – many even remember the exact moment they heard the news – but also the uncertainty and disillusionment that followed. Society splintered, slogans lost their meaning, and people began to doubt what they once took for granted. Skepticism, irony, and fragmentation color this stage.
• Metamodern memories emerge later in life. These are layered, ambivalent reflections that mix nostalgia with critique, and sincerity with irony. Tito is remembered not only as a leader but also as a pop-cultural figure, even a trickster who can be both admired and joked about. In this mode, memory becomes playful and complex – a way to grapple with contradictions rather than resolve them. 

The takeaway

Looking at Tito through these three lenses tells us more than just the story of one man or one country. His figure carries paradoxical political potential. On the one hand, Tito today is almost universally acceptable because he has become a cultural phenomenon – a pop-cultural icon, a trickster, even a nostalgic joke. But the moment someone tries to turn Tito back into a political figure, the consensus collapses. He works as a shared symbol precisely because he entered the realm of cultural memory.

At the same time, our study highlights a deeper puzzle: how can we even separate personal memory from collective memory? Many interviewees recalled their childhood and youth with warmth and pride … but isn’t this what people usually do? Don’t most of us, regardless of ideology, believe that our younger years were the best? Whether those were the years of modernist socialist progress marked by Tito, the democratizing 1980s filled with New Wave and punk, or the so-called “end of history” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, soundtracked by Eurodance, punk rock, and Britney Spears, the pattern is strikingly similar.

In this sense, what we hear in the interviews is not only about Yugoslavia or socialism, but also about a universal generational tendency – the socialist “boomers” looking back fondly at their prime, just as future generations will likely do with theirs. But will we? What if the opposite is true — what if certain periods really were better than others? 

The memory of Tito, then, is both specific and universal. His figure anchors memories of Yugoslavia, while also serving as a mirror of how people everywhere make sense of their past: by mixing nostalgia with critique, and by interweaving personal experiences and collective myths. This is why studying these memories matters – not just because they help us understand the legacy of Yugoslavia, but because they allow us to see how memory itself shapes the way we view the present and imagine the future.

Disclaimer:

This text was prepared with the assistance of AI (ChatGPT) for drafting and editing purposes.