Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia by Babović Jovana (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 565 Perović’s history is an invaluable addition to the growing modern historiography of the North Caucasus which should be used by all future students and scholars of the region. Department of History Alex Marshall University of Glasgow Babović, Jovana. Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018. ix + 259 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Works cited. Index. $27.95 (paperback). Metropolitan Belgrade is an ambitious attempt at a sociocultural history of entertainment in interwar Belgrade. Babović presents to the English language reader the scholarship of Belgrade historians Dubravka Stojanović, Radina Vučetić, Ljubodrag Dimić and Predrag Marković, among others, and brings additional archival and press coverage. She places entertainment in the wider context of popular culture in Yugoslavia as well as globally, as it was during this period that the capital of the newly unified country immersed itself in transnational genres such as jazz, film and cabaret. The most important contribution she makes is to link this existing scholarship to that about entertainment in other European capitals, to which Belgrade aspired to be compared.Yetthisapproachisnotwithoutrisk,asitsambitiontoaccommodate and project Western discourses on class, bourgeois morals and spatial analysis often turns out to be unsubstantiated. In Babović’s analysis the Belgrade middle-class, or otherwise interchangeably defined bourgeois urbanites, chose to be consumers of foreign popular culture as a demonstration of their participation in European metropolitan modernity, as opposed to their alleged civic duty of promoting the emerging Yugoslav high culture or nurturing that of the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Further archival research and an examination of the readily available views of outsiders — the numerous foreign journalists, travellers and residents in Belgrade (only Rebecca West’s disillusionment is mentioned) would have resulted in a more nuanced picture. More significantly, Babović fails to consider the enormous influence, as both creators and consumers of entertainment, of the massive influx during this period of Russian émigrés, who thrilled Belgrade audiences, such as the singer Olga Jančevecka or prima ballerina Nina Kirsanova. Jewish immigrants are mentioned, but only in a discussion about entry permits, and there is no mention of the thousands who streamed into Yugoslavia from Eastern Europe, and especially Germany SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 566 and Vienna, after 1933 and 1938 respectively, many of whom revolutionized Belgrade jazz, cabaret, opera and other spheres of culture and entertainment. There is a chapter on the pillar of Belgrade’s entertainment industry — Radio Belgrade — but it does not mention that the station was established by a group of Jewish and German entrepreneurs. One of them, Marconi representative Julius Hanau, also served as the key British intelligence officer in Yugoslavia. His story is just one example of the multi-dimensional aspect of Belgrade’s entertainment culture that the book’s imposed straitjacket of a theoretical framework does not allow for. Babović’s examination of the contemporary press yields some evidence that it endowed foreign popular entertainment with higher cultural value, but it is not sufficiently compelling to draw the conclusion that it marginalized local performers and their lower-class patrons, leading to spatial segregation, cultural stratification and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years. According to Babović, Belgrade ‘middleclass urbanites who eagerly consumed foreign entertainment’ left ‘little room for Yugoslav entertainers’, but she then does precisely the same, by leaving out almost all of them from her study, including the two greatest local divas — actress Žanka Stokić and singer Sofka Nikolić. Nikolić was also Belgrade’s greatest export to the European and global stages, where she befriended Josephine Baker — another missing link in what is otherwise the richest chapter in this partial book. Babović covers at length Josephine Baker’s tour of Yugoslavia in 1929, at the moment when its king assumed dictatorial powers, juxtaposing Belgrade’s overwhelming and enthusiastic embrace of Baker during her week-long stay with Zagreb — where clashes between Croatian nationalists and conservative Catholics interrupted her first show and led police to cancel the rest of her visit — and provincial Ljubljana, where no one showed any interest in her at all. A highly entertaining read and a genuine contribution in...