Excerpt from the book

19.June 2024 Ivan Ivanji (1929–2024)

Once upon a time in Yugoslavia

While Ivan Ivanji was in Weimar, he received an email from Laguna with a photo of the cover of his latest book Once upon a time in Yugoslavia. He liked her. He looked forward to it as he looked forward to every new book. And he wrote dozens of them, he couldn't even list them all himself. It turned out to be "testamentary", the last one. He died on May 9, the Day of Victory over Fascism. The book arrived in bookstores a few weeks later. It is a testimony of a still young state that has just begun to stand on its own self-governing, socialist legs. It is the memory of a man with an elephant's memory, who always doubted him, a man who was present on so many scenes, like few in Serbia, Tibor Varadi wrote in the preface and concluded: "If we are interested in where we actually are, I think we should read Ivanjija". On this occasion, we publish an excerpt from the book

Recommendation

12.June 2024 S.Ć.

Ivan Ivanji: Once upon a time in Yugoslavia

"I must honestly state that I testify about my sighting of a certain person or a specific event." If it's wrong, it's my fault. Whoever disagrees should forgive me," wrote Ivan Ivanji in the introduction to the book "Once upon a time in Yugoslavia", which was published a few weeks after his death.

In memoriam

17.May 2024. MS/MP

Ivan Ivanji - only he never got to grow old

If he had described the death of one of his literary heroes like that, I would have told him that he was exaggerating, it doesn't really work that way in real life, concluded Andrej Ivanji, the son of a writer and journalist whose whole life was full of symbolism

In memoriam

15.May 2024. Andrei Ivanji

Ivan Ivanji's last move

It is pointless to say that we were surprised by the death of a man who reached the age of 96, but somehow we started to believe that he is immortal and that, at the very least, he will make it to a hundred. But Ivan Ivanji was always headstrong. He did what he had in this world and left on his own terms

I remember

10.April 2024. Ivan Ivanji

Novi Sad raid 21.1.1942/XNUMX/XNUMX: My beautiful life in hell

Exactly 80 years ago today, I started school in Novi Sad. In front of the house was a big poster in Hungarian, Serbian and German: "Raid..." We skimmed over the explanation: there are suspicious persons and large quantities of weapons in the city, no one is allowed to leave the apartment, the windows must be closed, it is forbidden is to look at the street. No school! I was not interested in anything else then. I was barely 13 years old

Dobrica Cosic: The book about Titus

28.February 2024. Ivan Ivanji

Father of the nation about the greatest son of our people

Already at first glance, the book is full of contradictions, the short sections were obviously written according to the current mood of the author. Perhaps the most valuable thing would have been lost - passion, a certain nervousness, honest self-examination - if it had been edited thematically more logically, with a cool head. I think it's good that she appeared before us as she is

Interview

24.January 2024 NR

Ivan Ivanji: "I like to talk to myself"

Writer, translator, man who went through hell, but says his life was mostly good. Ivan Ivanji speaks for "Vreme" more about the future than about the past

Culture

01.January 2024 Ivan Ivanji

This year's New Year's concert in Vienna: A little too perfect

Today I watched the traditional New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic on television for the 1th time. Different conductors had different approaches to this spectacle, which is one of the most watched in the world. Christian Thielemann insisted on absolute precision and seriousness this January XNUMXst

Fragments of growing up

28.July 2023 Ivan Ivanji

In the new double issue: We love being neutral!

In 1940, as if out of the blue, the so-called Korošč laws on Jews were passed and my father introduced me to them with the conclusion that I should study even better. I didn't know how to do it because I already had all fives and I didn't see the terrible clouds coming unstoppably from the west. Yes, at that time there was already a big war going on somewhere, but in our country the people from Beća naively sang "Alay vole we are neutrals!"

In the New Year's double issue: The beginning of journalism in SFRY

29.December 2022 Ivan Ivanji

Once upon a time in Yugoslavia

The head of Serbian agitprop, Comrade Gedža, thought that I should work in the editorial office of "Omladina". At the time, I did not pay attention to the fact that Comrade Gedža's civil name was Dobrica Ćosić; we also knew about Tito that his name was Josip Broz, but he was simply Tito. At the time, no one had any idea what Comrade Gedža would become: an award-winning and celebrated writer, dissident, president of Yugoslavia, father of the nation. For me at that time he was Agitprop, meaning the controller of destiny, it didn't occur to me to protest

I remember

02.November 2022 Ivan Ivanji

"The Uranium Project": How I Met Hitler's Scientist

Eight years after the end of World War II, I spoke in Hamburg with Professor Erich Bagge, who worked with Heisenberg in Nazi Germany on the atomic bomb project. They didn't even realize how close they were. Fortunately for humanity, Hitler did not realize that the atomic bomb was not the imagination of mad scientists

I remember

12.July 2022 Ivan Ivanji

International Committee of Prisoners: Our good SS

The prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp secretly founded the International Committee of Camp Inmates. He had three main tasks: to rescue communists, social democrats and younger and healthier inmates who had a better chance of survival, to form a "lagerschutz" and organize camp infirmaries. It saved my life - I was taken off the list for Auschwitz and sent to the Niederorschl labor camp

I remember

11.January 2022 Ivan Ivanji

Referendum trick to electoral victory: How Bruno Krajski did it

I guess in order to divert the conversation from the gloomy question of what will happen after Tito's death, Bruno Krajski, out of context, told how he organized a referendum on the construction of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant with the intention of losing, but then gaining an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections. Veselin Đuranović looked at me in astonishment, I guess he wondered if I was translating correctly, but I was equally astounded.

I remember

29.December 2021 Ivan Ivanji

Dobrica Ćosić: Writer, member of the Central Committee, "father of the nation" and a direct and natural person  

On this day 100 years ago, Dobrica Ćosić was born. Whether as a member of the Central Committee, or as a renegade and later "father of the nation" and president of the state, he was always direct and friendly. Born in Velika Drenova, a village in Western Morava, the heart of original Serbia, he was a Serb in body and soul. He had shaken off the mantle of false internationalism. I didn't agree with the politics that came from his national convictions that he espoused, but I always loved the man

My new year

28.December 2015 Ivan Ivanji

Salivation of fear

I remember seventy-five New Years celebrations. Here I will mention some, which seem more significant to me than others: when I poured lead with my father and threw it into the water, which in our country today is called spitting fear, when I watched lice flee from the dying, dramatized "The Pit" by Ivan Goran Kovačić , watched Peka Dapčević and Milovan Đilas, danced the waltz with his wife on the streets of Vienna

Culture of Remembrance - One performance, one exhibition and one show about the Holocaust

03.June 2015 Ivan Ivanji

My cry from a child's mouth

I feel an obligation to speak about the Holocaust. Increasingly, the fewer of us alive who can bear witness to that Time of Evil. At the same time, what I had to say seemed more and more meaningless to me, it seemed to me that few people wanted to hear, wanted a future that remembered my terrible times. Especially in Serbia, in Belgrade, which were so thoroughly cleansed of Jews. And then the students of the Third Belgrade Gymnasium shouted on the stage of the Bitef Theater. That cry of girls and boys seventy years younger than me was my roar, my protest that the world is the way it is, my cry for my parents, a cry for all my dead, which I was never capable of