Metropolitan Belgradepresents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the ...attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society.As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade's middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state.Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life.Metropolitan Belgradetells the story of the Europeanization of the capital's middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.
This dissertation examines entertainment in Belgrade during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when it was overwhelmingly foreign. Entertainment presented an everyday challenge to social hierarchies ...propped up by elites, conservatives, and reform-minded bourgeois and petit bourgeois residents. More importantly, its ubiquitous presence was yet another impeding force to the development of a unified Yugoslav culture, all the more detrimental in the state’s capital city. I argue that foreign entertainment destabilized the notions of class and gender that formed the fundamental pillars of Yugoslav society, just as it democratized both national and elite cultural hierarchies. At the same time, this dissertation situates the Yugoslav capital on the web of hegemonic urban culture originating in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin. Although Belgrade remained politically, economically, and socially peripheral to Europe’s metropolitan centers in the two decades after the Great War, I argue that foreign entertainment forged new links between the Yugoslav capital and Europe by privileging residents with access to the mainstream cultures of the continent’s metropolitan centers.
After she lost her job as an entertainer at the Belgrade restaurant Krokodil in 1936, Tatjana Gez wrote to the Association of Actors to ask for help wrangling the remainder of her unpaid salary. The ...proprietor had unjustly fired her, Gez explained, because she had refused to wait on tables once she had finished with her duties on stage. This was a breach of her contract as well as the state statute that prohibited female employees from simultaneously working as entertainers and servers. As a trained stage actress, Gez was astutely aware that she was vulnerable to loss of her
Josephine Baker was scheduled to arrive in Belgrade on the afternoon of 1 April 1929 for a highly anticipated visit. As the day neared, several journalists from the capital traveled to the state ...border in order to be able to meet her as soon as her train crossed into Yugoslavia. As the members of the press rode back toward Belgrade with Baker, their dispatches offered a glimpse into citizens’ first encounters with the African American performer who had risen to fame in Paris a few years earlier. At the rail station in the town of Subotica, for example, the crowd
Around the same time Radio Belgrade launched, the daily newspaperPolitikaprofiled Saturday night parties at a pub called Kod Lepe Katarine (At Pretty Katarina’s) that was located at the intersection ...of Njegoševa and Beogradska Streets near the central Slavija Square. Unlike downtown variety theaters popular among the middle classes, this venue catered to the city’s working-class residents. The author caricatured the parties as “potato balls” because most of those in attendance spent their days performing menial labor like cleaning wealthy homes, waiting on tables, and peeling potatoes as cooks. Saturday nights were their only free evenings, he explained, and
In the 1932 novelTerazije, a modernist ode to interwar Belgrade, the cultural critic Boško Tokin imagined the city’s grand narrative as an “unfinished symphony.” It was not so much that it lacked a ...score, but rather that its metaphorical orchestra resonated with a disharmonious mélange of “humanity, contrast, bustle, and movement.” In Tokin’s estimation, Belgrade needed an able conductor to mold its constituent parts into a melodious whole.¹ Contemporary readers would have easily applied this symbolism to the city’s incongruous sights, such as cobblestone streets intersecting with paved roads, wooden shacks teetering near multifloor apartment buildings, and horse-drawn carts
In the high-budget motion pictureČarlston za Ognjenku(Tears for Sale, 2008), the director Uroš Stojanović (1973–) told a story about Yugoslavia in the first decade after the Great War for a Serbian ...audience in the first decade after the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. The film followed two sisters, Ognjenka and Boginja, as they traveled from their village to Belgrade and gradually exchanged their provincial habits for urban ones. In the opening scene Stojanović cast this fictionalized interwar tale into the narrative of Serbian history. He suggested that the prewar Kingdom of Serbia had lost two-thirds of its male population
In the novelPogled s Kalemegdana(The View from Kalemegdan, 1938), the writer and state official Vladimir Velmar-Janković (1895–1976) speculated that “those who live by the comparisons of how much ...Belgrade is not Europe or, worse yet, how it should be more like Europe in its appearance and its residents, will likely suffer from an ailment like jealousy, suspicion, cynicism, helplessness, and hysteria.”¹ He implied that Belgrade’s built environment actually shared little in common with other European capitals and that its residents were misguided in their attempts to mimic Parisians, Londoners, and Berliners. Moreover, he went on to suggest,
