BELGRADE (37 page)

The work is generally regarded as Crnjanski’s greatest contribution to Serbian Modernist prose. It concerns two brothers, Vuk and Aranđel Isakovič, and Vuk’s wife, the lady Dafina. The two brothers are brought up in the Serbian community of Vojvodina. Vuk serves as an officer in the Habsburg army, defending the frontier against the Turks, the traditional enemies of his people. He is even posted to Belgrade for a short period during the Austrian occupation between 1717 and 1739. Meanwhile, his brother becomes a rich merchant, trading up and down the Danube and dedicating his life to making money.

The novel revolves around these two contrasting characters. While Vuk dreams of overcoming the Turks and leading his people home, Aranđel has no such fanciful notions and wishes his brother would abandon his ambition, which only obstructs the wheels of commerce and his business ventures. He represents the pragmatic new generation, having come to the West determined to make the most of the new opportunities. When on one of his trading trips he almost drowns in the dangerous waters separating the two settlements, we are made to understand that the distance between them is metaphorical as much as geographical. Between the West and the Ottoman Empire lie uncharted waters, separated by the tension between modernity and tradition.

Belgrade and Zemun epitomize two different but linked paths in their architectural and urban designs. Zemun expanded in the nineteenth century, adopting from an early stage western styles of architecture that are easily discernible in its main streets and squares. But since the town had no ambition to become a capital city, there are far fewer signs of the more monumental styles found in the centre of Belgrade. It is more modest and unassuming, giving the impression of a greater self-confidence in its identity, evolving more slowly and steadily than its big brother. Zemun even gave responsibility to the city engineer for overseeing new building projects in the second half of the nineteenth century, thereby assuring greater coherence in the architectural appearance of the town. In time, the advent of steamships on the Danube and the weakening of the Ottoman grip across the river sent Zemun into a relative decline. But the arrival of the railway in 1883 with a bridge to Belgrade emphasized once more its geopolitical significance. Austria increasingly saw Serbia as a rival in southeastern Europe, and Zemun rediscovered a function as a customs point with border controls, the last staging post on the edge of the Balkans. This fresh impetus brought a new wave of German and Jewish settlers, merchants and artisans, eager to supply Belgrade with western goods and more.

Isidora Sekulić (1877–1958) was a writer who was born in Vojvodina, spent her childhood in Zemun and lived most of her adult life in Belgrade. Among her work she has left many accounts of her travels and memoirs of Belgrade and Zemun. At one point she turns her attention to this relationship between the two cities:

Culture and civilization, magazines with the latest fashions, silver-plated cutlery, upright pianos, lace-up shoes for ladies, recipes with fine dough for bread and rolls (something like at the time of Gospodar Jevrem) and a little of the German language—all that came from Zemun on boats as private freight, or in parcels addressed in the name of Master so-and–so.

Zemun did not just supply goods to Belgrade, but was regarded as a cultural model, teaching western tastes to its co-nationals across the water.

Zemun could not, however, escape its status as a community in the Habsburg Empire. The Hungarians of the empire decided to celebrate 1,000 years of their settlement on the Pannonian plain by building five tall towers, one in Budapest and four others. The southern millennium tower was erected in Zemun in 1896 on top of the hill where the fortress had stood in earlier times. The area is known as Gardoš, a term derived from the old Slavonic word
gard
for a town or a fortress (
grad
in modern Serbian).

There were to be no more Hungarian or Austrian monuments here from the time that Serbian troops entered Zemun on 5 November 1918 and it became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The town’s status again changed fundamentally. It was no longer an important border post but a quiet spot by the Danube, a favourite spot for lunch, away from the more hectic pace of Belgrade. The short journey could be made by boat, or by crossing the new King Alexander I Bridge spanning the Sava. It became an administrative part of the capital city in 1934, finally losing the autonomy it had enjoyed for almost two centuries. But Zemun did achieve the distinction of being home to the headquarters of the new Yugoslav air force. It provided the closest flat and solid ground to the capital, and the first civilian/military airfield was established nearby between 1929 and 1931, at the end of the street today called Tošin Bunar. In those days travellers could get to the airport quite easily from the centre of the old town by taking either a bus from Terazije or a tram from in front of the National Assembly.

The Second World War brought yet more changes for Zemun. It was occupied in April 1941 by German troops, and from October was under the jurisdiction of the Independent State of Croatia with its fascist Ustaše government. The Ustaše authorities conducted vicious policies against the non-Croat population, especially Jews, gypsies and Serbs, and Zemun lost a quarter of its 65,000 inhabitants. It was again a border town; the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was wiped away and Croatia and Serbia met at the point where the old Ottoman and Habsburg empires used to glare at one another. Following its liberation, it has continued its quiet life, relatively unburdened by demands from outside although remaining an administrative part of the capital.

Plans to integrate the two towns have been facilitated by road links but Zemun has retained something of its separate atmosphere. Some redevelopment and building work tool place after the war, but far more attention was given to founding New Belgrade, which has filled in the gap between the bank of the River Sava and the periphery of old Zemun. The older community’s central district has the feel of an organic settlement that has evolved over time in tune with the demands of the people living there, whereas New Belgrade is an environment with solutions imposed by architects and administrators working on an initial blueprint. Zemun is something of an antidote for those who prefer their cities less planned and with life at a slightly reduced pace.

New Belgrade (Novi Beograd) is the quarter occupying the area on the other bank of the River Sava from the old town, between Belgrade and Zemun. Before the Second World War this was mainly fields and meadows, a place to go for an excursion, perhaps for a picnic or for lunch in a country inn. There were plans to build here before the Second World War in order to unite Belgrade with Zemun. Bridges were constructed across the Sava and some work began, but the results were limited. Although it may no longer seem obvious, much of the land around Belgrade was wet and marshy and not conducive to large building projects without extensive drainage programmes. One of the earliest significant buildings on the opposite bank from Kalemegdan was Belgrade’s first major exhibition site, the Old Exhibition Ground (Staro sajmište). It was completed in 1937 and can still be seen to the left of the Branko Bridge. Industrial fairs, concerts, exhibitions and some sporting fixtures were held here before the Second World War. It provided a venue for events which were of international significance, helping to promote Belgrade on the world scene as a city with facilities to attract outside investment.

When Belgrade was occupied the German authorities converted its buildings for use as a concentration camp. Many of the city’s Jewish community were sent here, and then transported further afield or, indeed, met their end here. Some Serbs supported the occupying forces, but the overwhelming majority of ordinary Serbs were appalled by their anti-Semitic policies and helped individual Jewish families as they could. The almost total disappearance of the Jewish community is a very dark episode in the history of the city. Unfortunately, like many events of the Second World War in Belgrade, the fate of the Jews was not commemorated by the communist government. It fell under the general silence that tended to surround the city’s war-time experience.

As in other areas, it has largely been the efforts of writers of fiction that have introduced the public to new interpretations of the past or presented events that the communists tried to consign to collective amnesia. The 1998 novel
Götz and Meyer
(Gec i Majer) by the Serbian-Jewish writer David Albahari deals directly with the topic of the Belgrade Jews in the war. In his version of events, the narrator of the work is a school teacher in contemporary Belgrade who becomes obsessed by what befell his family during the war. They were all Jews sent to the Old Exhibition Ground from which not one returned alive. He has to do his own detective work, and discovers the awful method by which the Nazis killed their prisoners, constructing a special truck in which the fumes from the exhaust pipe were fed back into the enclosed wagon set behind the driver’s cab. He tries to make his pupils from school empathize with the fate of the Jews, but they become hysterical. As he delves further into the past, so he begins to relive the trauma of the Holocaust. He even imagines that he sees the two drivers of the Nazi death-truck, the Götz and Meyer of the title, in Belgrade, giving their bodies a reality which history has otherwise forgotten. The closing image sees the narrator about to defend himself from what appears to be their attack as they enter his apartment. The Old Exhibition Ground has given up its secrets, but now they have to be faced by the current generation.

After the Second World War the communists had very ambitious plans to build a new city across the Sava and work began at the end of 1947. The inhospitable terrain required huge preparations to make it fit for construction and much was done by work brigades. These were groups of volunteer workers, students and others who gave their time and efforts to many of the large construction projects promoted by the new government in many areas of Yugoslavia. Such brigades were an important ideological institution, projecting the image of a country once divided by sectarian violence during the occupation but now united behind the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Participation was also a way of taking part in the new system, bringing rewards both for those who truly believed in the ideals of communism and others who recognized it more selfishly as a starting point for a career in the new political structure. The brigades also attracted people from abroad, often members of the youth wings of various socialist parties in Western Europe. Many found themselves working on the project for New Belgrade.

The new district was planned according to socialist principles. One of the men responsible for drawing up the scheme was Milorad Macura (1914–89). He pointed out that in capitalist societies towns are not built on the basis of a rational programme, but in such a way that out of the amorphous conglomerate of structures making up the residential areas some buildings “enjoy all the privileges of a proper site, while others put up with all its deficiencies”. New Belgrade was to be designed in order to avoid this kind of class differentiation. The apartment blocks were built in a regular and symmetrical order, while care and attention was given to providing suitable green areas between them for recreation. Pedestrians and motor traffic were divided in order to maximize the cleanliness of the environment. Provision was made for easy and effective access to transport facilities to other parts of Belgrade. Schools, shops and other urban facilities were included in the planning stages, but in the end there were not enough and many residents complain of the lack of amenities. All in all, New Belgrade has the air of a regulated and not an organic environment.

One of Belgrade’s writers, Mihailo Pantić, has written a collection of short stories,
New Belgrade Stories
(Novobeogradske priče, 1994), set among the tower blocks across the Sava, and in one of them evokes with a few brush-strokes the opinion of many: “You have almost geometric perfection, that town without a real or even imagined centre, without a square and without a church, consisting only of residential quarters, which cannot be connected in any way into a single whole, but in the sharp air of early dawn shimmers like a slimy multi-celled colony thrown up on the riverbank.”

New Belgrade is the residential district of the city most associated with communism. Since it was intended to be the Communist Party’s showcase of socialist planning, a number of prestige projects were placed here. The Palace of the Federation (Palata federacije), the main government building on the federal level, was built between 1947 and 1961. It is a large complex with offices for the civil service surrounded by parkland close to the river between Mihailo Pupin and Nikola Tesla boulevards. A building of 26 storeys, then the tallest in Belgrade, was completed nearby in 1964 to house various political organizations, including the central committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It later became headquarters for the Socialist Party of Serbia when led by President Slobodan Milošević during the 1990s, and was thus a target for NATO missiles in 1999. After the bombardment the building was renovated, reduced by a few storeys that had suffered most damage and sold to a private developer. It is now known as the Confluence Business Centre (Poslovni centar “Ušće”). A new exhibition venue, the Sava Centre (Centar “Sava”), was constructed in 1977 close to the graceful Gazelle Bridge and used for concerts, film premieres, conferences and other events. The Hotel Beograd Intercontinental was added as part of the complex in 1979. The Hotel Hyatt Regency was completed ten years later by the road leading onto Branko Bridge in a bold architectural style. The Museum of Modern Art (Muzej savremene umetnosti) can be seen directly across the Sava from Kalemegdan almost by the water’s edge. The museum, opened in 1965, is set in a large grassed area and houses a collection charting the development of Yugoslav painting, sculpture and graphic arts from 1900 to the present.