Photo: Aleksandar AnđićArchitect Bogdan Bogdanović was born on August 20, 1922 in Belgrade. "My last memory of him is the memory of a city builder horrified by the actions of city destroyers," wrote Milan Milošević on the occasion of his death. On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, we are publishing parts of an interview from "Vremen" number 96 from 1992
When Bogdan Bogdanović graduated, he went with his father, Milan Bogdanović, to buy a suit according to the customs of the time, and that's when they started the initiation conversation of adults. Bogdan asked his father what that republic would be like. Milan answered: "Judging by the monarchy, quite bad..." He told that autobiographical anecdote at that time with a certain self-irony characteristic of people of broad culture and a developed sense of realism aware of the flaws of their own environment that must not be kept silent.
As a young professor at the Faculty of Architecture, I met him as a young journalist of NIN for the first time in those years when he was leading the New School of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, of which he was the founder. It was, as one would say today, a kind of creative workshop. He encouraged students to imagine civilization, its culture, language, symbols and to design cities on that basis. In that school of thought, architecture and urban planning grew organically from the era in which they were created. In his "The Vain Mystery", which some say is a book about the architecture of secret societies, we were introduced to the mythical and symbolic aspects of architecture.
Prophet of evil times
When many years later, in the circumstances of the war, I spoke with the satanized opponent of the war, professor Bogdan Bogdanović, in his apartment in Vračar, cramped, full of books and somewhat dark, he also mentioned that school with a bitter memory of a kind of Red Faculty in accordance with the spirit of the time of the time, which the liberals of that time apparently supported, and those after them abolished all that, in the end even the version of that school that resisted there in Mali Popović in the building of a old school.
Bogdan Bogdanović was an urban planner, philosopher, humanist, and the last memory of him is the memory of a city builder horrified by the actions of city destroyers and the ignorance of new ideologues. It was a sad 1992.
I can testify that he belonged to those few people in our midst who, a few years before, not only sensed the impending disaster, but also spoke impressively about it. At the time of the so-called events of the people and differentiation in 1987 and 1988, one of his open letters, which would later turn into the book "Dead ropes - mental traps of Stalinism", warned against shamanic rhetoric that heralds a dangerous pyromaniac plague. The symbolic image of a psychiatric institution remains in the memory from that text "Laza Lazarevic" in flames.
The voice of Bogdan Bogdanović seems to have been the most impressive among the voices of the pacifists of that time. I see no better way to cherish the memory of that man than to convey that bitter conversation from 1992 published in Vremen number 96. After that I never met him again. He went to Vienna in 1993 and, unfortunately, did not return to this environment.
Dissection of nationalist dead bands
Bogdan Bogdanović lived then in a kind of personal isolation, not losing his presence of mind in his quiet determination to persevere in the vivisection of Serbian nationalist corpses and in opposing the senseless war in the Yugoslav territories. In a dozen interviews, he spoke against the war, after which disqualifications and outrageous satanization followed.
The entrance to the apartment of Professor Bogdan Bogdanović, the creator of the monument to the victims of Jasenovac, was covered with huge black graffiti that stretches from the ground floor to the first floor, which says that it is "Ustasha apartment of Bogdan Bogdanović". Professor Bogdanović did not erase those graffitis, as if he did not want to interfere with Serbia rewarding in its own way the opponents of the war that ruined its reputation and its future, those who might be able to redeem its conscience.
About the destruction of cities
"Twenty years ago, I wrote that in the modern world, cities are becoming more important than the nations that emerged during the industrial revolution and that are still pressing the mind of every smart person today, and belonging to the city has always been, ever since there have been real cities and real citizens. more important than the ethnic one," said Bogdan Bogdanović at the time.
"In the great cities of the world, beginning with Memphis and Babylon, even the 'national' language was not a completely clear category. In the same big city, within the framework of the same city culture, it was possible to speak various languages, provided that everyone understood the basic, quiet or noisy, but in any case non-mushy language of the city that they chose of their own free will.
Choosing a city is an ethical and aesthetic decision. If I could separate myself from Belgrade (because that was also a choice, today I feel more unhappy than happy), I would probably choose Bologna, because it has nice arcades, just like Vukovar had recently, in a small way.
Now Vukovar has been destroyed, the Croats promise that if they get it, they will leave that city in ruins. I haven't found the strength to go around that ruined city yet. I'm not talking about Mostar yet, because I haven't gotten to the point where I can imprint it on my mind. Sarajevo reminds me of a man lying down and trying in vain to get up.
There is one terrible method in all this madness — demolishing the city is the simplest way to change the regional ethnic structure. It seems absolutely crazy that the city you want to own. The respected writer of novels in which there are neither cities nor cities, speaks with undisguised anger about those who would like to impose the attribute of city destroyers on us... He forgets the simple obligation to say who destroyed the unfortunate cities, the cities of the novels, and why".
About traveling companionship with death
"I am afraid that something worse than anything is growing, a model of darkness is growing, a model of non-lay Serbia, clerical Serbia, darkness over darkness is growing, I mean the theocracy's attack on the secularity of Serbian culture...
Death was a high abstraction for me, but this is some elemental, how can I say, companionship with death. Nature and death, that's a formula that I myself took from the war. Then my dying in hospitals, for six months I languished in sepsis, in pus, in severe temperatures... but it was not companionship with death in this erotic, libido-like way.
That connoisseur of Serbian bitterness (Dobrica Ćosić), that taster of the time of evil, seems to carry a mourner inside. I saw it in Pljevlja, he was tired and kind of bent over... I don't like to see my friend look so weak."
About Dobrica Ćosić
Out of all of them, I still hung out with Dobrica the most. I was trying to teach him something, but it didn't work... We loved him, he came as a peasant, wore a black hat, they called him "Gedža" and he stuck to that nickname of his. He started protesting only later. My father once said during lunch: "Children, they call him a geja!" People do not give nicknames by accident. We'll see what that means!'
For a moment, I thought that the respected head of my country, which is no longer mine, and which the children call "Gezhistan", had experienced a moral revival. After his first antediluvian troubles, I saw that he had no moral obstacles. He absolutely does not feel that he helped much to create something so ugly.
After that, I was afraid that he would not be a war president."
About the Academy of Sciences and Arts
"I have painful memories from that society." I thought we could talk about serious things. I realized that there, especially in the art department, they don't touch on philosophy, architecture, the city, history, and register non-attendance at meetings.
I got rid of them easily, a friend told me that in an interview I described the atmosphere a bit like Swift. After that, I didn't belong there anymore, and they still considered me their corresponding member, they kept me so that it wouldn't happen that someone leaves the Academy. They even sent me some money, but I returned it regularly. I even wanted to ask for the help of the Human Rights Committee. I guess I could get out of the monastery, with a bit of luck I might be able to escape, if I were a woman, from a brothel in the Middle East, but I can't get out of the Academy, because nobody got out of it.
The Serbian academy was all obsessed with the attitude of being a working academy, like those in the Soviet Union from the time of Brezhnev, when it was the Ministry of Science. If it took the example of the French academy, to be a sweet circus and some satisfaction for the old men who can occasionally hang up those sabers, it would be much better...
Deroko once said to me: 'What are these communists of yours doing?' I got along with those old academics, they admitted me to the academy, and I argued with my party comrades. They always politicized everything.
They wanted to be a big factor in society, and then very quickly it turned into a will for power. They had an elaborate story about their mission. That would have been fine if they had political ideas, but it all turned upside down. What is written in the Memorandum, I have heard a thousand times before that. They used to say that a nation only needs the Academy once. Well, now she was needed and this is what they did.
Some say that they even planned, and this is extremely likely to me, that they had some committees for demography and that they even calculated how many Serbs could die for the liberation of the western regions, without the biological being of the Serbian people being endangered. I don't know if that figure has been reached, but I see, as far as the Serbs in Croatia are concerned, that they have succeeded in what Anta Pavelic failed to do."
About the feeling of cataclysm
"Krleja's astonishingly horrific picture of our world was accurate: that blood of his and that mud of his. He carried a feeling of cataclysm. I had a vague feeling that it wasn't going to be good, but that it was going to be so terrible, I couldn't imagine it. Before this calamity befell us, I wrote about city destroyers. When I announced the text for the city and against the city, and talked about possible city destroyers, Pilja Marković came out, my text annoyed him ten years ago. Today, it is published in the West as an extremely current text.
I had some prophetic intuition. For the monument in Čačak, I literally came across some animals that bite. I concluded that the beast was within us. When I was building the monument in Vukovar, I was drawing a city of decay. Worst of all, I'm afraid I can't see how terrible it is myself."
On the emergence of nationalism from communism
"It turns out that today's unbridled virus of nationalism was raised in vitro, back in communist times. This new nationalism seems to have absorbed all the limited arrogance of the Marxists, all the exclusivity and all the hypocrisy of the Bolshevik character type and combined it with the most morbid variety of pseudo-romanticism. In Serbia, and I believe in other parts of the former Yugoslav space, today's most bitter anti-cosmopolitans, religious converts, and even fanatics of racism, came from dogmatic communist ranks.
Within the framework of proletarian internationalism, the bomb of nationalism was carefully guarded against evil. In this regard, Yugoslavia was not an exception in the East. The republican centers, more precisely the republican central committees of the Communist League, had their secret nationalists and their public dissidents, that dangerous game, but always as a rule game under protection.
After all, the Memorandum was written exclusively by former communist academics. It amused me at first, I was watching those men between the Academy and the Central Committee and I thought that in that case it was also about a man. Later I saw that the thing was 'self-initiated'. I am inclined to believe that the writers of the Memorandum secretly hoped to hit the hidden thoughts of the comrades from the then Central Committee of Serbia. However, things have gone too far, or rather, they have already gone downhill in a big way.
Slobodan Milošević did not dare to accept the Memorandum publicly, but soon, with the diligence of a schoolboy, he began to implement it... So who is more monstrous - Frankenstein or his creator?"
About the beginning of the decline
"Sunovrat began with the arrival of Milosevic. Measuring spiritual guilt is more difficult, but also more important. Because the deviation of opinion, which led to one Milošević, can lead to a new Milošević through a generation or two.
It is safest, when examining the deeper causes, to start from the notorious fact that national paranoias, at least in the Balkans, are based above all on the stimuli of an inflamed imagination. Non-objective and ignorant handling of history encourages parahistory, building phantom images of former greatness and imposed failures leads to the search for historical injustices and world conspiracies.
Dobrica Ćosić's war novels have been preparing for years the state of spirits that will lead to the Memorandum and, consequently, to today's conquests, and I fear the bloodshed that accompanies them.
To round off this literary-political scherzo, I will remind you that the designers of the Bosnian horror are two or three poets of dubious value and one unfinished historian of literature, while Radovan Karadžić himself is a psychiatrist by profession, a strategist by function, and a folklore poet in his free time.
Read daily news, analysis, commentary and interviews at www.vreme.com
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