Post-war Yugoslavia Research Articles

THE HOLOCAUST, INVESTIGATIVE DISCOURSE AND BARE LIFE – TRAUMA AND MEMORY

The work will primarily explore the position and status of the Jews in the post-war Yugoslavia, especially in relation to the momentous year of 1948, which represents the final split between Tito and Stalin, the fact that caused some radical changes in Yugoslavia and deaths of an enormous number of people who were thought to have been political dissi- dents. Also, the work will touch upon the position of the Jews during the World War II which, although not as unbearable as in the rest of the world, was far from something to be desired. Further, the paper will deal with the investigative discourse employed by Danilo Kiš during his interview with Eva Nahir Panić and Jennie Lebel, two women who survived Goli otok and whose testimonies Danilo Kiš was to use in the making of his documentary Bare life in col- laboration with the director Aleksandar Mandić, first broadcasted in 1990. In the context of the aforementioned physical torture that political dissidents had to endure on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur, the work will make use of the novel by Antonije Isaković entitled Tren 2 which, though fiction, gives an insight into how political dissidents were treated by the authorities and which methods were used in their re-education. The analysis will try to show that evil and repression are inseparable, inherent parts of every totalitarian regime, regardless of geographical area or time of its existence.

A review of housing policy in post-war Yugoslavia and Kosovo

ABSTRACT This study examines the literature on social housing in Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and covers different topics and approaches. By combining findings spanning the periods of development, construction techniques, Yugoslavian particularities, social approaches, standardization, finance, and investment, it takes a comprehensive approach, hitherto missing. The literature review is conducted at two levels: the central level in Yugoslavia and the local level in Kosovo. While there is a massive gap in the local context, the aim is not to fill this gap but to demonstrate how one can begin to address and gain insights into social housing in 1970s Kosovo. The urban planning and design principles that influenced social housing in Yugoslavia were also present in Kosovo, as in other Yugoslav cities, but to varying extents and on a smaller scale.

Slovenians in the Anti-Fascist Struggle in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Building the Federal Foundations of Yugoslavia (1941-1945)

Understanding the socio-historical processes after the April War of 1941 and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia presupposes a deeper knowledge of opposing national perspectives since 1918, when this country was created, of the events between the two world wars, as well as their multidimensional characters, since they largely determined wartime polarizations and alignments. The Second World War is one of the most problematic historical periods in the post-Yugoslav area, from a scientific and political point of view. With numerous relief and insufficiently explored components, it still belongs to the so-called “hot memory”. The disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1941 was greeted by its peoples and political subjects with different visions of whether (and if so: how) a new Yugoslavia should be established. The anti-fascist struggle was led by a partisan movement with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) playing a dominant role. Each Yugoslavia (“old” and “new”) also meant “a new constitutional concept of the relationship between its main peoples/political groups” (Dejan Jović). The history of the Slovenes, wrote Edvard Kardelj at the end of the thirties of the 20th century, “is nothing but a long chain of oppression and trampling of a small nation”. After the First World War (the “Great War”), the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the collapse of Austria-Hungary divided the Slovenes among four countries. The parcelization of the Slovenian ethnic space did not end there. The territory of Slovenia (Drava Banovina) after the fragmentation of Yugoslavia in 1941 was divided between Germany, Italy and Hungary, into six parts, with different administrative regimes. The Slovenian people were torn apart, humiliated, threatened with destruction and disappearance from the ethnic map of Europe. This people was one of “the most fragmented in Europe and all the occupiers planned to wipe it out through persecution, assimilation and denationalization. Research on refugees and exile is closely related to issues of human rights, nationalism, genocide and ethnocide. This issue has a humanitarian, political, legal and moral dimension. Part of the exiled Slovenes also came to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1941, which was part of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Slovenes have a specific place in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the 19th century. They also contributed to the development of the National Liberation Movement ( NOP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by acting in an illegal revolutionary movement and partisan units, as well as participating in the constitution of the new government and defining the future internal structure of post-war Yugoslavia. The war in the territory of occupied Yugoslavia was, among other things, a civil war that destroyed the idea that this monarchist state can be restored in the form in which it was created in 1918. The ranks of the NOP included Slovenians who lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war, as well as those who came as exiles in 1941. Major events related to the construction of the “new” Yugoslavia took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which Slovenians participated, important for the history of Slovenia as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By actively participating in the anti-fascist war, the engagement and visions of their prominent representatives at the top of the NOP (Edvard Kardelj and others) and in the activities of the AVNOJ in 1943, determining and making its landmark decisions, the Slovenians had a significant share in the victory and establishment of a new, federal the Yugoslav state and the construction of the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Complex Yugoslav federalism, with scattered forms and models, represented a specific historical phenomenon.

Praxis and Action: Toward Building as a Collective Practice in Postwar Yugoslavia

Praxis and Action: Toward Building as a Collective Practice in Postwar Yugoslavia

From Paperwork to “Mechanized Administration”: Designing the Bureaucracy of Self-Management in Postwar Yugoslavia

From Paperwork to “Mechanized Administration”: Designing the Bureaucracy of Self-Management in Postwar Yugoslavia

The Documentary Imaginary of Brotherhood and Unity: Nonfiction Film in Yugoslavia, 1945–51

This article explores how nonfiction film in postwar Yugoslavia (1945–51) expressed a fundamental ambivalence that negotiated a desire for and image of a unified nation-state (supranationalism) with that of one made up of multiple nations (nationalism). I argue that nonfiction film became a key vehicle for communicating the ideological principle of “brotherhood and unity” (“bratstvo i jedinstvo”), a slogan Yugoslav Communists used to articulate a solution to the challenges of a unified, multinational, and multiethnic Yugoslavia. This effort, I contend, emerged not simply through cinematic textuality but also through the social experiences people have with cinema: not just by seeing national bodies laboring and cooperating with other peoples but also by viewing them together in a presentational space, by experiencing a film program with overlapping and conflicting thematics, and by the industrial and institutional organization of nonfiction film itself. Mobilizing Peircean semiotics and Taylor's concept of the social imaginary, I argue that the documentary imagination of “brotherhood and unity” emerges from a combination of textual and extratextual factors, an interrelation of materiality and discursivity.

Delo koje ne zastareva - 125 godina od rođenja arhitekte Nikole Dobrovića (1897-2022)

There are few realizations in modern Serbian architecture that are as constantly written and spoken about as those of the charismatic Nikola Dobrović (1897-1967). Melded in Central Europe, and affirmed in interwar and post-war Yugoslavia, his works left a deep mark in all areas of the profession, from design and construction, to urbanism, theory, criticism, historiography, conservation and university teaching. As an uncompromising visionary of the democratic city, he encouraged a radical modernization of the architectural stock, setting an example for the generations that followed. In doing so, he developed an independent conception of International Modernism, the principles of which he consistently advocated. Although there are fewer and fewer contemporaries who remember him, generations of admirers and architectural historians prevent Dobrović's personality and works from being forgotten, repressed or sanitized. Hence, as part of the celebration of the 125th anniversary of his birth in Belgrade, several events of a scientific and educational character were organized.

Slobodanka Stefanović - život jedne ilegalke

Slobodanka Stefanović belongs to the generation of young men and women who reached adulthood during the thirties and who were willing to fight for the revolutionary transformation of their country. Her life and work as a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a member of the resistance, and a close associate of the important people in the post-war Yugoslavia, was sporadically mentioned in post-war historiography, and more recently it has been followed by the arbitrary media interpretations that have relied heavily on the process of her political rehabilitation. Her activity within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, her work as a member of the resistance, her arrest, imprisonment, stay in the Institute for Compulsory Education of Youth in Smederevska Palanka and her tragic death soon after the liberation of Požarevac in 1944 are closely connected to her relationship with Slobodan Penezić Krcun, the relationship that has still been insufficiently studied. Judicial rehabilitation did not clarify the circumstances of her engagement during the Second World War, or the circumstances of her death, it only defined that her life ended without a proper judicial procedure and a verdict. Slobodanka Stefanović's life and death represent the rigorous relation of the Communist Party towards its members, which implied the complete subordination of the individual to the interests of the movement and its ideology. Mistakes, weakness and dispiritedness were not forgiven even to erstwhile friends, and if a transgressor was a woman, severe punishment was due because of the traditional view on women's role in society regardless of the emancipatory potential of the communist movement.

The Memory Policy of the Second World War in the Post-Yugoslav Republics: Symbolic and Commemorative Aspects

The paper analyses the politics of memory of the World War II (WWII) in socialist Yugoslavia and compares the corresponding commemorative practices in the post-Yugoslav republics. The focus is on the design of holidays and memorial dates that reflect the symbolic and valuable attitudes of society, as well as the trajectory of nation-building. The formation of the state metanarrative in post-war Yugoslavia was closely related to the monopolisation of the leadership roles of the national liberation war by the communists, who united the six South Slavic nations in their struggle against the Nazi invaders. The state holidays and memorial days were derived from the history of resistance to foreign occupiers and internal enemies in order to legitimise and strengthen the triumph of the new socialist order. Alternative Yugoslavian non-communist movements, especially the Ustash and Chetniks who were potentially capable of competing in the symbolic field, were declared class enemies, reactionary elements, and quislings. As the processes of disintegration increased in socialist Yugoslavia, there were several attempts to revise its ideological attitudes and symbolic heritage of WWII. Nevertheless, as the study shows these attempts became, rather, a marginal phenomenon, and most post-Yugoslav states retained the commemorative, albeit de-ideologised, practices of the previous period.

Nomachi , Motoki Kiyosawa , Shiori Grammatika v obshchestve, obshchestvo v grammatike. Issledovaniia po normativnoi grammatike slavianskikh iazykov (review)

Slavonic and East European Review, 99, 4, 2021 Reviews Nomachi, Motoki and Kiyosawa, Shiori (eds). Grammatika v obshchestve, obshchestvo v grammatike. Issledovaniia po normativnoi grammatike slavianskikh iazykov. Studia Philologica. Izdatel´skii Dom IaSK, Moscow, 2021. 304 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Price unknown. This useful Russian-language volume is edited by two scholars from the SlavicEurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan’s leading institutionintheinterdisciplinaryfieldofSlavicstudies.Interestingly,although this exquisitely manufactured book was typeset and published in Russia, it was actually printed in Japan. Its focus is on how historical and political processes conditioned the concepts and production of the grammars that standardized Slavic languages, which now function as official and national languages in independent nation-states. The authors of these grammars were the products of their times and social situations, and as such their publications reflected these conditions, thus contributing to the shaping and coalescing of standard languages in accordance with social, cultural and political requirements. Rewardingly, unlike in traditional linguistics that takes languages for granted andseesthemasproductsofnature(e.g.AugustSchleicher’sSprachorganismen), this collection approaches languages as artefacts of human ingenuity, choice and labour. The book’s chapters are grouped into three sections that correspond to the current tripartite classification of Slavic languages, which in itself is a political creation, given that areal linguists distinguish only two Slavic dialect continua: Northern and Southern. Oksana Aleksandrovna Ostapchuk and Shiori Kiyosawa open the volume with chapters devoted, respectively, to the two Ukrainian grammars by Olena Kurylo and Oleksa Syniavskyi, and the Belarusian grammar by Branisłav Taraškievič, conceived at the end of the Great War and published before the Soviet Union was founded in 1922. During the period of the Soviet policy of korenizatsiia, these works were instrumental in standardizing Ukrainian and Belarusian, and their use became widespread in Moscow’s official ‘struggle against Great Russian chauvinism’. With the first five-year plan this policy came to an end. The grammars were banned and replaced with ones that strove to bring Belarusian and Ukrainian ‘closer to Russian’, the aim being to Russify both languages. All three grammarians were repressed and lost their lives, either by execution or in Soviet concentration camps. This change in fortunes opened a clear career path for the ethnically Russian philologist Viktor Vinogradov, who worked on the standardization of Soviet Russian through authoritative dictionaries. Daisuke Adachi’s chapter is not devoted to any grammar but focuses on Vinogradov’s reflection on the contribution of the fiction of the ethnically Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol´ (Mykola Hohol’) to REVIEWS 743 the emergence of standard Russian in the first half of the nineteenth century, including Ukrainian linguistic loans. A rather brief second section on West Slavic omits Czech and Sorbian, instead focusing on late eighteenth-century grammars by the Catholic priests Onufry Kopczyński and Anton Bernolák, in chapters by Natalia Evgen´evna Anan´eva and Konstantin Vasil´evich Lifanov respectively. Kopczyński’s grammar became the primary school textbook of the first-ever state-wide educational system in Europe and facilitated both the standardization and spread of Polish. Bernolák’s gave rise to a Western standard of Slovak that was subsequently replaced by a Central standard in the mid-nineteenth century which forms the basis of today’s Slovak, since Bernolák’s standard was deemed too close to Czech. The book’s third section on South Slavic languages considers Ivan Bogorov’s early mid-nineteenth century standardizing grammar of Bulgarian, the standardizing grammars of Serbian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Valentin Vodnik’s early nineteenth-century school grammar of Slovenian, in chapters by Maria Nikolaevna Belova, Danko Šipka and Ol´ga Sergeevna Plotnikova respectively. However, no discussion is offered on grammars of Croatian or the post-Serbo-Croatian languages of Bosnian and Montenegrin. In a way, the section compensates for this absence with two final chapters by Elena Vladimirovna Verizhnikova and Motoki Nomachi devoted, respectively, to the early standardizing grammars of Macedonian by Krume Kepeski and the Soviet linguist Samuil Bernstein (Bernshtein). The 1944 decision to recognize and develop Macedonian as a language in its own right in post-war Yugoslavia was intended to offset the influence of Bulgaria’s wartime occupation. However, the...

Small Socialism: The Scales of Self-Management Culture in Postwar Yugoslavia

During the early 1950s the Federative Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia underwent a series of radical politico-economic reforms that created the system of socialist self-management. Although scholars have long acknowledged that these reforms liberalized the field of cultural production, the precise ways in which self-management shaped Yugoslav culture during this period remains under-examined. Drawing from Daniel Immerwahr's concept of “thinking small,” this paper contends that self-management be thought of as an effort to rescale the horizons of socialist modernity. As Yugoslav reformers diverged from the Soviet model of Stalinist high modernism, they descaled state power to local sites of administration. This turn towards “small socialism” was recorded in certain conceptual and methodological trends in the cultural production of this period. This paper explores this recalibration of the scales of socialist culture in three examples from the 1950s: the urban theory of Bogdan Bogdanović, the revival of dialect poetry in Croatia, and the proliferation of domestic travelogues that emphasized the diversity of local cultures. As these examples demonstrate, the ambivalence that many Yugoslav intellectuals felt with regards to the high modernist scales of Stalinism prompted them to redirect the focus of socialist culture towards the marginal, the minor, or the minute.

Tetiana Okunevska – “people’s actress” of postwar Yugoslavia. Theater and cinema as a means of intercultural communication

Tetiana Okunevska – “people’s actress” of postwar Yugoslavia. Theater and cinema as a means of intercultural communication

Britanske ocene obrambnih zmogljivosti jugoslovanske vojske po sporu z Informbirojem med letoma 1948 in 1951

Prispevek obravnava obdobje med letoma 1948 in 1951, ki je veljalo za eno najtežjih v zgodovini povojne Jugoslavije. Leta 1948 je bila izdana resolucija Informbiroja, s katero je bila Komunistična partija Jugoslavije izključena iz Informbiroja. Pričakovanje vojaške intervencije Sovjetske zveze in njenih satelitov je v Jugoslaviji sprožilo veliko upravno-organizacijskih in doktrinarnih sprememb, s katerimi se je Jugoslovanska armada odzivala na strateške premike v vojaškopolitičnem položaju države. Ta kriza je ponovno pripeljala do proučevanja izkušenj iz narodnoosvobodilne vojne in prisilila Jugoslavijo, da je vzpostavila tesnejše stike z zahodnimi državami. Vojaško in politično dogajanje v Jugoslaviji je natančno spremljala tudi britanska vlada, ki je od britanskega vojaškega atašeja prejemala poročila o stanju v jugoslovanskih oboroženih silah. Posebej so zanimive britanske ocene sposobnosti obrambe Jugoslovanske armade v primeru sovjetske vojaške intervencije in tega, kako bi lahko Britanci v takih primerih vojaško oskrbovali jugoslovansko stran.

Constructing the world of equal opportunities: The case of architect Vladimir Antolić

Discourse in the field of architecture and urban planning remained essentially the same in Croatia from the 1930s until the Second World War, and then until the mid 1950s, despite radically changing socio-political systems. This should be credited to Zagreb-based ‘salaried architects’. In the 1930s, they pointed to a major social problem—the substandard living conditions present throughout the country. Questioning the implementation of projects and plans within liberal capitalism, some even entered politics. In post-war socialist Yugoslavia, the circumstances radically changed. Reviewing these pre-war and post-war stages as a single process, this article highlights to the contributions of architect Vladimir Antolić (1903–1981), one of the first trained urban planners in Croatia and a member of International Congress of Modern Architecture. It will demonstrate how his work on the Zagreb Regulation Plan helped to define key issues of urban planning practices in Yugoslavia and show the significance of the so-called European ‘periphery’ in the modern movement’s narrative.

Richard Klemen, the First Lecturer of Enzymology at the University of Ljubljana

Richard Klemen was the first teacher of enzymology at the University of Ljubljana. His early career in Ljubljana ended in January 1942 when he moved to Vienna, Austria. During the war he conducted experiments that led him to describe the so-called Hofmann-Klemen effect in clay. Later he was a research assistant and titular associate professor in the field of biochemical technology at the Vienna Technical University and finally a lecturer at the University of Natural Resources in Vienna. His life is an interesting example of a scientist and educator whose Gottscheer German origin would probably prevent him from continuing his career in post-war Yugoslavia. At the same time, he did not achieve in Austria the positions and status that his former colleagues and students had achieved in Slovenia. Although he was almost forgotten, he remains important as the first trained enzymologist and teacher of enzymology in Slovenia. This article also presents his full bibliography.

«Большая сделка» Ялтинской конференции и ее осуществление на местах: случай Югославии. Приграничное повстанчество 1945-1948 гг.

At the highest level, Yalta's "grand bargain" became a diplomatic form of recognition of the Red Army's combat capabilities, but at the local level, the agreement was far from being observed. The rise of the anti-communist insurgency in post-war Yugoslavia relied, ideologically, and in border areas also financially, on the Anglo-American support. Besides the Serbian Chetniks, other rebel groups actively operated in Yugoslavia in the final months of the war and the first post-war years, including Slovenian units of the “Matthias’s Army”, Croatian Crusaders, Albanian ballists. Josip Broz Tito was no more considered a threat after his split with the USSR in 1948 and the number of rebels started to diminish rapidly. Some “pro-Soviet“ rebellions which occasionally occurred did not receive real support and faded away thus giving Yugoslavia four decades of peace.

“Running into Madness to Stay Sane”: the Spirituality of Nature in the Autobiographical Texts of Female Prisoners from Goli Otok Prison Camp

The text concerns the camp for political prisoners established in 1949 in Yugoslavia on Goli Otok island. This theme was almost entirely absent from public discourse before the 1980s, and real changes and developments in discussions about this part of the history of postwar Yugoslavia occurred only after Tito’s death. Goli Otok as the largest and most infamous camp in communist Yugoslavia is considered a symbol, its name recognized as a synonym of a physical and psychological system for destroying people. In the text I analyze autobiographical texts written by women prisoners (such as Milka Žicina and Vera Cenic). A large number of female inmates were sentenced just for being related to or keeping close contact with a male “enemy of the state”. Thus women were treated not as independent subjects, but as mothers, sisters and wives subordinate to male family members. The social exclusion of women prisoners and their families exacerbated the feeling of isolation and continued after leaving the camp. I am interested in the detail of the strategies of storytelling which are related to spirituality (focusing on nature) both during the period of isolation, when they searched for a way to survive it, as well as after release when the women tried to start a new life.

Yugoslavia as World History: The Political Economy of Self-Managed Art

Branislav Jakovljević's study on performance and self-management in Yugoslavia and Armin Medosch's research on New Tendencies and post-Fordism share a number of analytical frameworks that the review argues partake in a broader shift towards political economy as a key framework for art historical inquiry. This shift elicits what could once again be called a world-historical perspective: both of these books anchor their narratives in post-war Yugoslavia but only in order to show that the telling of the story of Yugoslav art requires the telling of the story of the world, a story that is not simply an instance of global or transnational (art) history. Instead, these accounts affirm a certain political teleology; they (re)turn to Yugoslavia to recall something that is lost, a ruptural, future-bound history that never saw its future, and whose interrupted course they historicize, offering a recourse to historical understanding as a step towards a new strategy of resistance.

Istraživanje avangarde - studija slučaja - zenitizam i centralnoevropski kontakti

New and seminal approaches to the historical avant-garde have begun on the global level in the 1960s, continued and expanded particularly in the 1970s, with different, sometimes even radically opposite interpretations. The determination, meaning and importance of the avant-garde were very much the product of the great divides in world society at the time. Therefore, not all historical material was available for research, and important social context and political conditions could not be openly discussed and clearly emphasized everywhere. The end of the 20th century introduced new interests, new orientations and a general rejection of major leftist ideas, which the avant-garde had historically belonged to. Therefore it is not surprising that the decline of research in avant-garde movements did not bring about a comprehensive reading of various cultural, particularly leftist phenomena from the first half of the 20th century. The case of the Yugoslav revue Zenit (Zagreb, Belgrade 1921-1926) and the entire movement of Zenitism had a particular social and cultural position. Completely marginalized and almost forgotten after World War II, it was only identified with the controversial personality of its founder Ljubomir Micic (1895-1971), considered in post-war Yugoslavia to be a nationalist and a conservative. Comparative studies of similar European avant-garde revues, their histories, objectives, poetics, manifestations and practices were leading in early 1980s towards a new, broader and much deeper reading of the Zenit revue and its significance for the Yugoslav cultural milieu of the 1920s. With various types of activities, a large number of collaborators and written manifestos with particular ideological determination, it became obvious that Zenit was not an isolated occurrence, but was very much connected to almost all progressive periodicals, intellectuals, writers and artists all over the world. It had a great humanistic, however utopian mission ahead: modernization of the entire society through the social role of international culture and art.

Cutting the Networks in Former Yugoslavia

This article reflects on the implications of historical change for art, in particular on the relation between the paradigm change from industrial to post-industrial societies, and the change from late modern art to postmodern art. The central narrative of this article is provided by the rise and fall of the international art movement and network New Tendencies which emerged in Zagreb, Croatia in 1961 and lasted till 1978. The background is provided by the unique conditions of postwar Yugoslavia, the gap between the ideology of self-management and its reality, and the increasing fossilisation of the system. Rather than providing a linear history, the article traces relationships between historical processes of different kinds: first, between Yugoslavia in a catch-up process of modernisation and innovative practices in art, such as New Tendencies, and in philosophy, such as the Praxis group, and Korčula Summer school; secondly, after the implications of 1968, Yugoslavia in a state of slow decline, at first invisible, and the rise of new artforms, such as the new art practices. As the social base for a modernist, utopian project such as New Tendencies was slipping away, new art practices emerged which were better capable of reflecting changing times.