BELGRADE
Page 17
The journals may seem from this distance to be minor by-products of the day, but they performed an invaluable function in promoting interest in the cultural life of the city and connecting it to the outside world. Some of them survived longer than others and became highly respected such as Zenith (Zenit) edited by Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971) from 1921 to 1926 and renowned for its excellent coverage of modern trends abroad.
The interwar period was remarkable for the way in which Serbian art and literature captured the same radical spirit found elsewhere in Europe and North America. There was also a group of poets who dedicated themselves to promoting Surrealism in Belgrade. Theorizing the experiments by the French poet André Breton and others, the Surrealist Manifesto appeared in Belgrade just a few months after its publication in Paris. The main local exponents were Dušan Matić (1898–1980), Marko Ristić (1902–84) and Milan Dedinac (1902–66), later joined by Oskar Davičo (1909–89). They were extremely active in all areas of literary and cultural life. Ristić and Dedinac, in addition to their poetry, were also known as publicists, writing about Surrealism rather than just practising it for themselves.
As in France, the Belgrade Surrealists were politically on the left and fellow-travellers of the Communist Party. Literary life, in particular, became fraught during the 1930s with polemical attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. Crnjanski and others expressed more right-wing views, which were to return to haunt them after the Second World War when the communists came to power and they found themselves condemned as enemies of the new regime.
The pre-war trend of the Belgrade novel also continued in the 1920s and 1930s in works by, among others, Rastko Petrović, Branimir Ćosić and Stevan Jakovljević. These reflect the consequences of rapid urban and commercial development leaving people caught between two cultures, two worlds of tradition and modernity. Much of the action in them is determined by the clash of patriarchal values and the new demands of the urban environment. Characteristic themes continued to highlight the breakdown of family life and the damage caused by excessive greed and materialist values.
The story of Branimir Ćosić’s The Two Empires (Dva carstva, 1928) is quite typical. The main character is the son of a secondary-school teacher whose ambition is to make a name for himself and enter Belgrade’s high society. His actions are conditioned by the way in which he lives in the city and what it expects of him. Beginning a love affair with a married woman, he hopes to further his aims through her social connections. At the same time, he befriends his lover’s husband and is then caught between desire for her and a sense of moral obligation arising from his friendship with her spouse. The solution is found only when the three of them are staying away from Belgrade’s corrosive influence in a monastery. The hero is helped by one of the monks to confront his conscience and he returns cleansed of the corruption of the city.
These kinds of stories gradually became predictable as a literary form, increasingly relying on sentimental and stereotypical characters and situations. By the advent of Second World War they were often wooden constructs, lacking the ability to shock their readership and capture the essence of a new social and cultural experience.
Literary and cultural life in Belgrade from 1900 to 1940 was a lively affair reflecting the city’s growth in the modern world. Belgrade was witness to new forms of expression for the new urban experience in theatre, music, film and literature, with trends and styles reflecting contemporary tastes abroad. Citizens of Belgrade could travel around Europe or North America and feel equally as if in their own home. The city’s institutional infrastructure and the ability of its artists to experiment with form and to develop their own poetic and prose traditions identified Belgrade as one of the new cultural centres on the old continent. Belgrade was learning to tell its own story, a narrative about a city and its citizens facing the challenges of the modern world after a somewhat shaky beginning. It was a society growing in self-confidence, adopting ideas from others and supporting its own indigenous artistic flair.
Chapter Five
KING ALEXANDER BOULEVARD AND TAšMARJDAN: THE RISING STAR OF COMMUNISM
THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND LIBERATION OF BELGRADE
Prince Paul tried to keep Yugoslavia out of the Second World War for as long as possible. He never expected to become regent and felt it proper that such momentous decisions as war or peace should be taken by Alexander’s legitimate heir, Peter, who would become of age late in 1941. But he could not keep the threat at bay for ever. Italy had significant interests in Yugoslavia and south-eastern Europe generally. It had been awarded territory after the First World War in Dalmatia and the Istrian Peninsula, home to large numbers of Croats. Albania became an Italian client state.
With an eye to expanding his influence in the region, Mussolini invaded Greece in 1941. The campaign did not go as well as hoped and he turned to Hitler for help. The quickest route for German troops to support the Italians in Greece was to cross Yugoslavia and immediate overtures were sent to Paul to allow the army’s passage. Prevarication was no longer an option, but the prince faced a difficult choice. He had strong Anglophile leanings, but could not expect help from Britain at the time. There was little popular support for an alliance with Germany. Serbia in particular maintained its traditional support for France, which was now a defeated country in the war. On a personal level, his wife was herself from the Greek royal family. Yet if he refused to cooperate with Hitler, he would place Yugoslavia in danger. In the end, he was forced to sign a pact with the Axis Powers in Vienna on 25 March 1941.
Reaction in Belgrade was swift and Paul was ousted in a coup led by General Dušan Simović supported by the army during the night of 26/27 March. Large numbers of demonstrators took to the streets chanting Bolje rat nego pakt (better war than the pact) and Bolje grob nego rob (better the grave than a slave).
In his play Prince Paul (Knez Pavle, 1991), Slobodan Selenić focuses on the dilemma faced by the regent, particularly his personal predicament, and even goes so far to suggest that Britain may have had a hand in persuading the army to act. There is, however, no historical evidence to support the claim. Winston Churchill welcomed the events in Belgrade, announcing,
Early this morning the Yugoslav nation found its soul. A revolution has taken place in Belgrade, and the Ministers who but yesterday signed away the honour and freedom of the country are reported to be under arrest. This patriotic movement arises from the wrath of a valiant and warlike race at the betrayal of their country by the weakness of their rulers and the foul intrigues of the Axis powers.
Alexander’s son, Peter, was declared to be of age, six months short of his eighteenth birthday, and Prince Paul went into exile in Kenya. Hitler was enraged and vowed to bring ruin to Yugoslavia. The German air force bombed Belgrade on 6 April, a land invasion followed, and final victory came quickly when Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April. The bombing campaign was as vicious as it was unexpected. Miodrag Pavlović’s poem “Belgrade 1941” (Beograd 1941, 1977) expresses the outrage, horror and fear instilled by the brutality of the attack on the city:
With a torch between its legs
a foul insect flies around
setting fire to houses
skins
cemeteries
books turn to bubbles
birds ask themselves
if people are cold
to light all those fires
the town quickly gathers
its own ruins
trees clutch at their heads
who’s this who dares
take the apocalypse
into his own hands?
Peter and his ministers fled the country and eventually formed a government-in–exile in London. The country was immediately dismembered with Germany, Italy and their allies, Hungary and Bulgaria, each taking a share of its territory. Croatia became an independent state under the Ustaše led by Ante Pavelić, who conducted a brutal campaign of terror and liquidation against Serbs, Jews and gypsies. Serbia was redu
ced to its borders from before the Balkan Wars, with a quisling government under General Milan Nedić although real authority was with the occupying German forces. Belgrade became a frontier town once more, looking out at Zemun, now in the independent state of Croatia, and Vojvodina as part of Hungary.
The Belgrade-born film director, Dušan Makavejev, known in the West for, among others, his film W. R.: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R.Misterije organizma, 1971), was a boy when the war began. He recalls the bombing and later occupation of the city:
Then the incendiary bombs began to fall, the National Library was burned down, as was a third of the city, all the bridges destroyed, the young King in flight. The German Wehrmacht arrived in town. Buildings were cut in half. Once they were opened up, you could see dining tables, chandeliers, pictures untouched on the wall, here a dentist’s surgery, there a bathroom with its tub. In the first days of the occupation there was neither water nor electricity. Various smells wafted through town. A temporary public toilet was hastily opened in the interests of order and hygiene, made by joining together bomb craters in the very centre of town behind a large fence with separate entrances for men and women.
This makeshift convenience was in Terazije. Makavejev remembers other events:
A couple of months later when they had cleaned Terazije up, five Communists were hanged from lamp-posts. A little to the left of them was an advert for the horse races, and under that, people from the town and refugees would drink beer.
Wartime Belgrade bore no relationship to the civilized pre-war city.
Elsewhere in Serbia remnants of the army continued to resist under the command of Colonel Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović (1893–1946). The government-in–exile made him chief of staff of what loyal forces were left, but it was difficult to impose overall strategic planning. His fighters were called Četniks, after the name given to the guerrillas who used to harass the Turks. They were a disparate army split into small units and their communications in occupied Serbia were sporadic. Leader of a Serbian rather than Yugoslav resistance group and loyal to the king, Mihailović was convinced of a future Allied victory. His policy was to wait, holding his soldiers in reserve to support the inevitable defeat of Italy and Germany in Europe. In some areas the Četniks disbanded altogether, in others they formed temporary alliances with the occupying forces in order to take revenge for Ustaše atrocities against Serbs, or to fight against their ideological opponents in the alternative resistance movement, the Partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and Josip Broz Tito.
The Partisans were eventual victors in the complex Yugoslav conflict—a mixture of resistance to outside invaders and internecine civil war—and have been awarded credit for most of the armed activity against Axis troops. Mihailović’s policy proved to be a mistake as he was unable to control those who ostensibly accepted his authority—for which he paid the price. Captured by the security service of the new communist state, he was executed in 1946 as a collaborator.
Tito (1892–1980), real name Josip Broz, was born in the border country between Croatia and Slovenia in 1892. He fought in the First World War for the Austrians on the Eastern Front where he was captured by the enemy and taken to a prison camp in Russia. The camp was liberated by the Red Army during the 1917 revolution, and the prisoners were given freedom in return for joining the Bolsheviks. Josip Broz accepted the offer and after the revolution was sent back to Yugoslavia as a trade union organizer. He served a term in prison from 1929 to 1934 for being a member of the Communist Party, an illegal organization, and returned to the Soviet Union. As an agent of the Moscow-run Comintern, he was appointed general secretary of the Yugoslav party in 1937. Tito was one of the code names which he adopted in order to hide his true identity from the authorities.
The Yugoslav communists arranged to meet in Belgrade on 4 July 1941 to discuss resistance to the occupation. Their destination was a modest house at 5 Botić Street in the exclusive residential area of Dedinje, belonging to Vladislav S. Ribnikar (1900–55), owner of the Politika newspaper and—in those desperate times—willing to help Broz against the invaders. His wife, Jara (1912–2007), a prominent writer after the war, recalled Tito’s visits to their house and in particular the meeting of 4 July, when seven men arrived at the house to plan the uprising. She describes in detail the bizarre ordinariness of the occasion:
First, they gathered in the garden, divided into small groups, sat on the grass and chatted. It was a beautiful, sunny day. The garden was empty as we had sent the children to friends for lunch, and they were to return only in the evening. We took a walk down the garden and explained the disposition of the house to those comrades who were not yet acquainted with it. It was agreed that in the event of danger they would leave via the neighbouring estate, make their way to Dedinje Boulevard and try to save themselves. We kept guard, but nothing happened. It was exceptionally quiet. There were no unexpected callers or neighbours popping round that day. Our guests withdrew from the garden into the dining room where they continued to work. Whiffs of cigarette smoke would float out the window from time to time. They asked for a snack for lunch, and drank a great deal of black coffee. They worked without a break, very intensively, until six o’clock in the evening. Then they began to come out, cross the terrace and into the garden. They breathed in the air, satisfied, in good spirits. Comrade Tito was the first to leave. The others walked a while more in the garden, joking and behaving as if they were having a picnic.
Although they took the decision to organize the resistance in Belgrade, the heart of the Partisan movement was in the countryside. The city was occupied and not a place to wage a guerrilla war. The communists also felt uneasy in the old capital. It was not their natural habitat and it exuded the atmosphere and values of the pre-war regime and society, which they were committed to transforming. Consequently, once in power, they said little about the Belgrade experience of the war. The city was not part of their narrative, and it was not theirs to commemorate. Refugees flooded into the city from Croatia and Bosnia with stories of atrocities against Serbs. Corpses would float down the rivers, some coming to shore, victims of the Ustaše on the other bank. From the point of view of the Allies, Belgrade was a resource used by the enemy, and as such a legitimate target. In April 1944 British and American planes systematically bombed the city in a series of attacks with much greater destructive effect than the Germans in 1941. The new government after 1945 did not record the full extent of all the damage inflicted on Belgrade nor all the names of those who perished.
Belgrade was liberated by the Partisans, with the help of the Soviet Red Army, in October 1944. Fitzroy Maclean, head of the British military mission to Tito’s headquarters, recorded his memories of the event in his book Eastern Approaches. The German army was in retreat and shelling Belgrade from Zemun as its troops tried to withdraw across the River Sava. Maclean noted the chaos in the streets, which were “crowded with civilians, some enthusiastic, some just standing and gaping. From time to time a shell would land full amongst them, killing several.” He was in the company of a senior Partisan officer who was taking his guest on a tour of the city centre with no regard for the obvious dangers. Maclean attributes his guide’s behaviour to his Partisan experience: “Accustomed to the hand-to-hand fighting of guerrilla warfare, long-range shelling meant little to him.” They reached Kalemegdan from where he could see the enemy withdrawing across the bridge over the Sava and racing on to Zemun. For a brief moment the bridge was empty, and then immediately filled with soldiers of the Red Army in full pursuit. Maclean recounts how German attempts to destroy the bridge failed due to the efforts of one old man who spied German sappers laying explosives under it on the night of 19 October 1944 and, realizing their intentions, disconnected the charges.
The arrival of the Partisans in Belgrade was not good news for many in the capital. Besides those who had collaborated during the occupation, others who had simply continued in their work or who did not wholeheartedly welcome the new ideology
of their liberators discovered that they could easily be denounced as traitors. On Monday 27 November Politika’s front page contained the names of 105 citizens who had been shot the previous day. The charges against them were accompanied by an article justifying the executions in the name of the people; it was signed by the Surrealist poet, now politician, Marko Ristić. Many of the victims were leading members of the pre-war elite, figures who might act as focal points for opposition to the communists, and their elimination was part of the new regime’s drive for mastery over the city.
The communists took to government in order to build socialism based on the Soviet model. Land, industry, transport and banks were nationalized. Elections were conducted on the basis of one list of approved candidates, giving the communists a legal mandate for their aspirations. Yet they were also genuinely popular, promising stability and some degree of normality after the years of bloodshed.
The new constitution was rooted in the 1936 constitution of the USSR. Yugoslavia was divided into six republics based on the national structure of the country: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia. Serbia itself was further divided with two autonomous provinces in the north and south, Vojvodina and Kosovo. Each constituent part had its own government and capital city, but real power was tightly centralized in the hands of the Communist Party. Belgrade was the capital city of both the Republic of Serbia and of the federal government with responsibility for the whole country. Officials, military officers and bureaucrats came to live in the city from all parts of the country, making a significant impact on its demographic composition. The old Belgrade rapidly disappeared as the new elite brought with them a new ideology. The city stopped looking westward and there was no further discussion of cultural and artistic contact with London and Paris. Instead, the new regime sponsored links with the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe and in particular with the first land of socialism, the USSR.