Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:21:20.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making Sense of Ruins: Architectural Reconstruction and Collective Memory in Belgrade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2019

Gruia Bădescu
Gruia Bădescu*
Affiliation:
Balzan Prize Research Group, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Email: gruia.badescu@uni-konstanz.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still lie in ruins and are at the center of debates surrounding their reconstruction. This article examines the collective memory and narratives of the NATO bombings through a spatial lens, looking at how architectural discourses of reconstruction relate to multiple understandings and narratives of the bombings themselves. It focuses on how architects in Belgrade discuss and envision the reconstruction of buildings such as the Generalštab in relationship to the collective memories of political violence and war. The article explores the continuum between calls for full restoration and memorialization, by discussing how architects relate to the bombing of 1999 on personal and professional levels, and how narratives of the bombing influence architectural visions for the reconstruction itself. All in all, the article argues that architectural reconstruction, collective memory, and national identity shape each other. On the one hand, reconstruction responds to collective memory as architects make sense of the collective memory of war; on the other hand, reconstructed urban space reshapes memory by creating a new cadre matériel for remembrance.

Keywords

ruinspostwar urban reconstructioncollective memoryBelgradeGeneralštab
Type
Special Issue: Collective Memories and Legacies of Political Violence in the Balkans
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 182 - 197
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrews, Malcolm. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Assmann, Aleida. 2006. “Memory, Individual and Collective.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, vol. 1, 210–225. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, Taïka. 2013. “La Ruine de L’en-Attendant: Un Cas D'éphémère Continu.” Sociétés 2: 25–34.Google Scholar
Bakshi, Anita. 2014. “Urban Form and Memory Discourses: Spatial Practices in Contested Cities.” Journal of Urban Design 19 (2): 189–210.Google Scholar
Bakshi, Anita. 2012. “A Shell of Memory: The Cyprus Conflict and Nicosia’s Walled City.” Memory Studies 5 (4): 479–496.Google Scholar
Blic. 2016. “Na Mestu Generalštaba Spomenik i Muzej Stefanu Nemanji.” Blic, November 21. http://www.blic.rs/vesti/beograd/na-mestu-generalstaba-spomenik-i-muzej-stefanu-nemanji/ch86sbh.Google Scholar
Bogdanović, Bogdan. 1993. Die Stadt und der Tod: Essays. Klagenfurt: Wieser.Google Scholar
Bogunović, Slobodan. 2000. “Teorija Pokrenutosti Prostora Kao Filosofski Osnov Zgrade Generalštaba Vojske Jugoslavije u Beogradu.” Godišnjak Grada Beograda. Knj. 47/48: 253–262.Google Scholar
Brenner, Neil, and Theodore, Nik. 2002. “Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Antipode 34 (3): 349–379.Google Scholar
Clark, Janine Natalya. 2008. “Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs.” East European Politics and Societies 22 (3): 668–692.Google Scholar
Coward, Martin. 2009. Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
David, Lea. 2014. “Mediating International and Domestic Demands: Mnemonic Battles Surrounding the Monument to the Fallen of the Wars of the 1990s in Belgrade.” Nationalities Papers 42 (4): 655–673.Google Scholar
David, Lea. 2015a. “Between Human Rights and Nationalism: Silencing as a Mechanism of Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Wars’ Serbia.” Journal of Regional Security 10 (1): 37–52.Google Scholar
David, Lea. 2015b. “Dealing with the Contested Past in Serbia: Decontextualisation of the War Veterans Memories.” Nations and Nationalism 21 (1): 102–119.Google Scholar
DeLyser, Dydia. 1999. “Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging the Past in a California Ghost Town.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (4): 602–632.Google Scholar
Diener, Roger. 2012. Belgrade: Formal / Informal : Eine Studie über Städtebau und Urbane Transformation. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess.Google Scholar
Dimitrijevic, Nenad. 2008. “Serbia after the Criminal Past: What Went Wrong and What Should Be Done.” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 2 (1): 5–22.Google Scholar
Edensor, Tim. 2005. “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (6): 829–849.Google Scholar
Elzanowski, Jerzy. 2010. “Manufacturing Ruins: Architecture and Representation in Post-catastrophic Warsaw.” Journal of Architecture 15 (1): 71–86.Google Scholar
Fenster, Toni. 2004. “Belonging, Memory and the Politics of Planning in Israel.” Social & Cultural Geography 5 (3): 403–417.Google Scholar
Forest, Benjamin, Juliet, Johnson, and Till, Karen. 2004. “Post-Totalitarian National Identity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia.” Social & Cultural Geography 5 (3): 357–380.Google Scholar
Forest, Benjamin, and Juliet Johnson. 2001. “Monumental Politics: Regime Type and Public Memory in Post-Communist States.” Post-Soviet Affairs 27 (3): 269–288.Google Scholar
Fridman, Orli. 2015. “Alternative Calendars and Memory Work in Serbia: Anti-War Activism after Milošević.” Memory Studies 8 (2): 212–226.Google Scholar
Gordy, Eric D. 2013. Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial: The Past at Stake in Post-Milošević Serbia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Google Scholar
Graham, Stephen. 2004. Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, Maurice, and Coser, Lewis A.. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hamilakis, Yannis. 2007. The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Herscher, Andrew. 2010. Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hillier, John. 1998. “Representation, Identity, and the Communicative Shaping of Place.”In The Production of Public Space, edited by Ann Leigh and Michael Smith, 207–232. Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Hirt, Sonia. 2008. “Landscapes of Postmodernity: Changes in the Built Fabric of Belgrade and Sofia since the End of Socialism.” Urban Geography 29 (8): 785–810.Google Scholar
Hirt, Sonia. 2012. Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City. London: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Hoelscher, Steven, and Aldermann, Derek. 2004. “Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship.” Social & Cultural Geography 5 (3): 347–356.Google Scholar
Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Huyssen, Andreas. 2006. “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room 23: 6–21.Google Scholar
Janowitz, Anne F. 1990. England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jansen, Stef. 2000. “Victims, Underdogs and Rebels: Discursive Practices of Resistance in Serbian Protest.” Critique of Anthropology 20 (4): 393–419.Google Scholar
Jansen, Stef. 2001. “The Streets of Beograd. Urban Space and Protest Identities in Serbia.” Political Geography 20 (1): 35–55.Google Scholar
Jansen, Stef. 2013. “People and Things in the Ethnography of Borders Materialising the Division of Sarajevo.” Social Anthropology 21 (1): 23–37.Google Scholar
Jovanovic, Miloš. 2013. “‘The City in Our Hands’: Urban Management and Contested Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Belgrade.” Urban History 40 (1): 32–50.Google Scholar
Jovanović, Weiss Srdjan. 2013. “National, Un-national.” Nationalities Papers 41 (1): 90–108.Google Scholar
Kansteiner, Wulf. 2006. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Kovačević, Bojan 2001. Arhitektura Zgrade Generalštaba: Monografska Studija Dela Nikole Dobrovića. Belgrade: Novinsko-informativni centar “Vojska.”Google Scholar
Kelly, Michael. 1996. “Public Art Controversy: The Serra and Lin Cases.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1): 15–22.Google Scholar
Ladd, Brian. 1998. The Ghosts of Berlin Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lavrence, Christine. 2005. “‘The Serbian Bastille’: Memory, Agency, and Monumental Public Space in Belgrade.” Space and Culture 8 (1): 31–46.Google Scholar
Lazic, Sladjana. 2013. “Memory Claims and Memory Constraints. (Re)Negotiating Statehood and Identities in Serbia.” Nationalities Papers 41 (6): 936–952.Google Scholar
Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
MacDonald, David Bruce. 2002. Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim Centered Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Matejić, Marko. 2012. “Prilog Proučavanju Zgrade Generalštaba Arhitekte Nikole Dobrovića: Koncept I Iskustvo Prostora.” Nasleđe 13: 167–183.Google Scholar
McLeod, Laura, Dimitrijević, Jovana, and Rakočević, Biliana. 2014. “Artistic Activism, Public Debate and Temporal Complexities: Fighting for Transitional Justice in Serbia.”In The Arts of Transitional Justice, 25–42. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Milošević, Miodrag. 2000. Svetlo, Uprkos. Agresija i obnova . Beograd: Elektroprivreda Srbije, Centar za odnose s javnošću.Google Scholar
Mitrovic, Mihajlo. 1999. “Mi gradimo, oni ruše.” Politika 18.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Katharyne. 2003. “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory.” Urban Geography 24 (5): 442–459.Google Scholar
Moeller, Martina. 2014. Rubble, Ruins and Romanticism: Visual Style, Narration and Identity in German Post-War Cinema. Berlin: Transcript Verlag.Google Scholar
Naef, Patrick. 2016. “Tourism and the ‘Martyred City’: Memorializing War in the Former Yugoslavia.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 14 (3): 222–239.Google Scholar
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18.Google Scholar
Obradovic-Wochnik, Jelena. 2013. Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans the Narratives of Denial in Post-Conflict Serbia. London: I.B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Petrović, Tanja. 2010. “Nostalgia for the JNA? Remembering the Army in the Former Yugoslavia.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Mariya Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 61–95. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Popović, Savo. 2013. “Zgrada Generalštaba Spomenik Pamćenju,” Novosti Online. March 5. http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/kultura.71.html:432270-Zgrada-Generalstaba-spomenik-pamcenju. (Accessed January 20, 2015.)Google Scholar
Pullan, Wendy, and Baillie, Britt. 2013. Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul, Kathleen, Blamey, and Pellauer, David. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sandercock, Leonie. 1998. Towards Cosmopolis. London: Wiley.Google Scholar
Stanilov, Kiril. 2007. The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Stewart, David. 1996. “Political Ruins: Gothic Sham Ruins and the ’45.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55 (4): 400–411.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219.Google Scholar
Subotić, Jelena. 2009. Hijacked Justice Dealing with the Past in the Balkans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Thrift, Nigel. J. 2008. Non-Representational Theory Space, Politics, Affect. London; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Till, Karen E. 1999. “Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache.” Cultural Geographies 6 (3): 251–283.Google Scholar
“Trump Zainteresovan Za Generalštab” [Trump Interested in the Generalstab]. 2014. Bizlife, January 13. http://www.bizlife.rs/vesti/65494-trump-zainteresovan-za-generalstab. (Accessed January 20, 2015.)Google Scholar
Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2009. Craft Matters: Artisans, Development, and the Indian Nation. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar
Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Volcic, Zala, Erjavec, Karmen, and Peak, Mallory. 2014. “Branding Post-War Sarajevo: Journalism, Memories, and Dark Tourism.” Journalism Studies 15 (6): 726–742.Google Scholar
Young, James Edward. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Žarkov, Dubravka. 2007. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar