BEYOND THE RUIN  Articulations of Identity in Belgrade’s Post-Conflict Cityscape  

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Beyond the Ruin: Articulations of Identity in Belgrade’s Post-Conflict Cityscape A thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh’s School of Architecture, of the Edinburgh College of Art, in partial fulfilment for a Master of Science, Cultural Studies 2012-2013 Student number 1236558 Course Director: Dr Ella Chimielewska Thesis Supervisor: Dr Tahl Kaminer Cover photo: Generalstab complex, March 2011 by S1235558

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Unknown ruin near St Sava Cathedral, Belgrade, March 2011 by S1236558

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Abstract

Starting from the theoretical premise that the interaction of memory and space are critical in producing

and articulating narratives of identity in architectural structures, this paper explores what happens to

these narratives when their structure is destroyed as a result of trauma. A process is proposed in which

the resulting ruins, comprising symbolic gaps in the city space, are suspended in a state of liminality

until meaning can be reassigned, an intervention which facilitates the gaps’ reincorporation into the

order of the city. This reincorporation, which takes the physical form of reconstruction or renovation,

yields new ways of engaging with the space and ultimately, the articulation of new narratives of identity.

This theoretical argument is then grounded in the context of post-1999 Belgrade and contains an

analysis of several sites within the city that have experienced this process as a result of trauma wrought

on the structures. It is the second intent of this paper to explore the new narratives of identity that have

arisen from the reincorporation of these sites into the order of Belgrade, an undertaking enhanced by

the comparative use of complementary sites in Berlin. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1990, the

reunified German capital was also struggling to come to terms with its past and articulate new

narratives of identity. Ultimately, the examination reveals Belgrade not only as a city struggling to

acknowledge and deal with its past, but as a city of multiple and, importantly, contradictory narratives

of identity that result in a state of ‘stagnation’ for the city.

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Acknowledgements

This work is a drop in a large pond, but it would not have been possible without the help of truly

wonderful family, academic supervisors and friends. In no particular order:

A huge thank you to my mum and dad, who have supported me from the beginning of this adventure,

only to be repaid with mid-day Skype calls and delirious 3:30 a.m. emails. It would be impossible to

overstate my gratitude for their continual encouragement and love.

I am also deeply appreciative for the mentorship of my thesis supervisor, Dr Tahl Kaminer, who

probably regrets leaving his office door open quite so often. He provided gratefully received critiques of

skeletal half-drafts, provided me with guidance when I didn’t know which path to take and remained

calm when our meetings inevitably ran an hour late. Dr Ella Chmielewska, my course supervisor, also

played an instrumental role in the writing of this paper: It was through a field trip to Berlin that I was

introduced to the city, an experience which informed, however indirectly, my consideration of the city

in these pages. She also provided a valuable sounding board since the first articulation of this paper

took shape last December, and helped gather up and reform what was left of my original premise after

my research trip opened my eyes to just how much a city can change in two years.

I’ve also had incredible amounts of support from several friends: Fiona Mortimer and Kirsty Munro

have supplied me with endless supplies of tea and chocolate during the writing of this paper. Gordon

Smith also lent valuable editorial and writing advice, and I am incredibly grateful to him for opening

his home up to me more than once during my research travels this summer.

I am also lucky to be able to express my thanks to Ivan and Milan Dinic, two Serbian brothers I had

the pleasure of getting to know during my 11 days in Belgrade. Ivan was more than pleasant in

answering my endless barrage of questions about his personal experiences of the 1999 NATO

bombing, the current political situation and other things you should never ask someone you just met.

Milan also helped shape my paper by spending his precious moments outside of his reporting job

showing me important political and cultural sites, explaining Serbia’s incredibly rich and complex

history to me and providing much-needed comic relief.

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Table of Contents Title ............................................................................................ 2 Abstract ..................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgements ..................................................................... 5 Table of Contents ........................................................................ 6 1. Introduction ....................................................................................... 7 2. Ruins, Gaps and Absences ............................................................... 10 3. Memory, Architecture, Articulation ....................................................... 13 3. The Collapse of Order ........................................................................ 17 5.1: The creation of the ruin and the physical collapse of order ............. 17 5.2: The creation of the gap and the symbolic collapse of order ............ 18 4. The Uncanny Absence ...................................................................... 19 4.1: The potential of the liminal Unheimliche ....................................... 22 5. Current Narratives of Identity in Belgrade and Berlin ............................... 25 5.1: The Narrative of Europeanisation ................................................. 27 5.2: The Narrative of victimisation ....................................................... 30 5.3: The Regress to absence........................................................... 38 Conclusion ................................................................................. Bibliography ................................................................................

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In t roduct ion In 1980, philosopher Umberto Eco proposed that architecture can be viewed as a communicative

device: “…We commonly do experience architecture as communication, even while recognizing its

functionality.”1 For Eco, architecture in the city has two main functions, embodied and intertwined in

the necessary components of form and function: The function of the architecture itself — that is to say

its utilitas — is the primary function. The secondary function of architecture (though he makes the

point that this ordering is not hierarchical but simply a means of division) is the communicative

function of architecture, i.e. its form. Insofar as the form of the building promotes the utilitas, the

building in turn articulates something about the culture that uses it, in particular the cultural context in

which that building is located.2

This communication, however, can be better seen as a two-way process. As Roland Barthes suggests in

his discussion of the Eiffel Tower, a structure can be seen as a transmission hub for the assignation of

meanings about a physical space, first coded by the architect in his consideration of the design, and

then by the people who interact with the space and imbue it with their own meanings3 — as well as,

according to Henri Bergson, memories. The building then communicates this amalgamation of

meanings as narratives of identity — an aspect of the cultural context — through its form, the

secondary function of the building.

Such a process works smoothly when the buildings in a city are intact and when the physical structure

can be interacted with, thereby directly facilitating symbolic communication. But in traumatised cities,

specifically for this paper post-conflict Belgrade, this process is interrupted as structures are ruined and

leave symbolic gaps, creating absence in the spatial order. Inevitably, meaning must be re-assigned to

the absence in order to symbolically and physically re-order a scattered landscape predicated on this

comprehensive order. It is through the process of re-assigning meaning and restoring physical structure

to the absence that new narratives of identity can be composed, comprised as they are from the

resultant new intersections of memory and space.

The post-conflict city of Belgrade is used as a lens through which to frame this theoretical discussion.

The city is currently struggling to reconcile its long-held consideration as liminally marginalised

between East and West (in the Saidian perspective, neither belonging to one nor the other), and also to

terms with the trauma of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign, unleashed to put an end to Belgrade’s role

as aggressor during the decade’s Yugoslav Wars. Four former gaps in the city — the Generalstab

complex, the Contemporary Art Museum, the Ušće Tower and Tašmadjan Park — will be presented

as reincorporated sites through which to consider the narratives of identity articulated in contemporary

                                                                                                               1 Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil 2 Ibid., 183. 3 Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard, reprint (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 6.

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Belgrade. Three sites in Berlin, a city that has largely succeeded at confronting its role in the Holocaust

and reconciling its post-reunification marginal status, are also presented as a comparative counterpoint

for Belgrade’s continuing struggle.

In order to lay the groundwork for subsequent sections, Chapter One begins with an introductory

definition of the ruins, gaps and absences considered in this paper. I distinguish between the ‘fast ruins’

of my examination and the ‘slow ruins’ of Classical considerations, including their temporality and role

in the spatial order of the city, before introducing the symbolic nature of the gap produced as a result of

a ruin. When the physical nature of the ruin and symbolic nature of the gap are combined, it creates a

liminal absence in the order of the city. The liminality of the absence, as well as its role in the order of

the city, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Four.

Chapter Two is an exploration of the interplay between memory, architecture and identity, construing

the production of narratives of identity as the result of a two-way conversation with the structural form.

Drawing upon the work of several philosophers, including Maurice Balbwachs, Henri Bergson and

Walter Benjamin, the chapter establishes that memory must have a collective social framework through

which it can find contextual meaning then imbued in the form via spatial practice. Pierre Nora is then

brought in to consider how memory is actually attached to sites of social practice, which he terms lieux

de mémoire. Lastly, Bergson and Eco’s work on architecture and communication helps provide a

framework through which the resulting memory is amalgamated and communicated back out as

narratives of identity, thereby establishing the articulation of identity not just as a message coded into

form by the architect, but as a dynamic conversation dependent upon the meanings and memory of

participants in the spatial practice of the city. The chapter then addresses what happens to these

components when the physical structure is ruined, positing that the resulting inability to communicate

with the structure via spatial practice results in an absence, predicating the silencing of identities in the

crumbling order of the city.

Chapter Three looks at the liminal nature of the absence, beginning with the ruin as a once-productive

structure in purpose-built city. Physical distinctions between structure and street can no longer be

drawn, and meaning is no longer contained within the structure: The absence physically and

symbolically bleeds onto the street, creating a state of “spatial anarchy.”4 What was once a rational

structure in the city is now irrational and creates an “absence of order”5 in the orderly city. This

physical and symbolic disconnect of the absence ultimately places it in a state of liminality: Where there

was once articulated function and purpose, there is now a suspension that creates the absence’s liminal

state. They hover outside of the spatial practice and social order of the city, between time and form.

The disconnect of finding absence in what was once present, or the strange in what was familiar, is a

discomforting one, and Chapter Four explores this uncanny nature of the absence, the ways in which

                                                                                                               4 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 26. 5 Henry Somers-Hall, “The Concept of Ruin: Sartre and the Existential City,” Urbis Research Forum Review 1, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 17.

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the absence confronts those exposed to it, and the process through which it is ultimately reincorporated

into the order of the city.

Chapter Five comprises the exploration of Belgrade and Berlin, examining the narratives they articulate

in spaces that have undergone this theoretical process. It begins by introducing Belgrade and Berlin, as

well as the two significant challenges of identity each city dealt with after their respective traumas:

Berlin after its 1990 reunification and Belgrade after its 1999 NATO bombing were both faced with

problems of dealing with a traumatic past in which they were largely considered to be the aggressor,

and both cities also faced a perceived need (externally or interally) to reconcile what was seen as a

marginalised positioning between East and West.

In the next section, four sites in Belgrade, each serving distinct functions at the time of the 1999 NATO

bombing, are mentioned as vehicles for the analysis: Tašmadjan Park, the USCE Tower, the

Generalstab complex and the Contemporary Art Museum. The resulting examination, framed around

the concept of Belgrade as a city dealing not only with the trauma of the bombings, but struggling to

reconcile its marginal position between East and West, reveals three distinct and largely contradictory

predominant narratives of identity articulated in each of these cities. Three complementary sites in

Berlin — Tiergarten Park, Potsdamer Platz, and the Judische Museum— are incorporated into this

analysis as a comparative tool. The three sites I mention are all those of a re-articulated identity

following reunification, thus provides an illuminating light with which to view Belgrade’s current

condition.

Finally, the relative success of Berlin in dealing with these problems ultimately proves to be a foil for

Belgrade’s continual struggle, articulated through these reconstructed lieux de mémoire and their often-

contradictory narratives of identity that, when “read” together, reveal a city in conflict with its past,

present and future.

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Chapter One Ruins, Gaps and Absences

Before this paper continues, for the sake of clarity it is important to address exactly what I mean by

‘ruin’ and ‘gap’— terms which will be used extensively in this paper — and to distinguish between

them. I also define ‘absence’ as the combined unit of physical ruin and symbolic gap that results in a

lack in the spatial order of the city.

Ruins Because ruins play a key role in the subsequent discussion of these urban gaps, it is important to first

define the type of ruins that will be discussed. Known as “fast ruins,”6 these are once-intact structures

shattered in the second of an explosion. In this post-traumatic state, the “new ruins” are “for a time,

stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality,” as

Rose McCauley describes them in an addendum to her The Pleasure of Ruins.7 But they need not be so

extreme as her description: It is possible, according to Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor’s

examination, to be “ruined…but still recognizable”8 — in other words, the hallmark of the ruin is that

instead of its form signifying function, as Eco would have it, its form now signifies the lack of function,

its inability to be used as it pertains to its primary function. Arrested in their existence and imbued with

the trauma that created them, they are caught in the window between explosion and Classic decay, not

yet outside of time but suspended within it.

Classical ruins, in comparison, can be regarded as “slow ruins,”9 their present form created not by an

explosion but by an incremental descent into the process of decay through abandonment or social,

economic or political transitions that play out over an extended period of time.10 This processural

nature of “ruin time,”11 as Florence Hetzler calls it in her discussion of Classical ruins, is what separates

the ruin from the trauma that created it, creating the inherently peaceful nature of the Classic ruin,

unified with nature and outside of time.12 Unlike the fast, or new ruin, we know the Classical ruin only

as a ruin, considering the structure from a temporal and figurative distance that removes us from the

trauma that was the catalyst for the ruin itself. In the fast ruin, we are continuously confronted with its

trauma, manifested in and communicated by its form.

                                                                                                               6 Gavin Lucas, “Modern Ruins,” in Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, eds. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming September 2013), quoted in Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 4 (August 2013): 2. 7 Rose McCauley, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker & Company, 1953). 453. In this post-WWII study of ruins and their enduring appeal (Ruinenlust), Rose McCauley briefly acknowledged the burgeoning importance of ‘new ruins,’ adding a three-page section on them as an appendage of her 455-page text. 8 DeSilvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 3. 9 Lucas, “Modern Ruins.” 10 DeSilvey and Edensor, 2-3. 11 Florence M. Hetzler, “Causality: Ruin Time and Ruins,” LEONARDO 21, no. 1 (1988): 51. 12 Ibid.

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There is also a key difference in the way in which slow and fast ruins interact with the spatial order

surrounding them. Classical ruins are distanced from the contemporary city: They serve as touristic

attractions or picturesque spectacles in the city-space, inherently existing only in their removed state.

There is no intention of restoring their missing function, or use facilitated by their form (utilitas)13, and

their function has now collapsed into and become their form (the aesthetic). Fast ruins and their

resulting voids, however, hang in a liminal state and, given the recent nature of the trauma, have the

potential to rejoin the social order through re-assigning meaning to the form. This re-assignation

precludes a reincorporation into the social order, ultimately paving the way for reconstruction of

function.

These fast ruins are those I have chosen to explore in an effort to understand how conflict affects how

aspects of identity are articulated in the post-traumatic landscape.

Gaps In this paper, I use gap to indicate the symbolic space, created simultaneously with the ruin, that

embodies the loss of architecture’s secondary function as it pertains to the symbolic order of the city —

that is to say, its inability to fulfil architecture’s communicative function (a process described in the next

chapter). While the ruin is the physical structure itself, the gap is the symbolic lack in the city it creates.

As further discussed in Chapter 4, without function, communication or the possibility of articulation,

there is a lack of rationality in the gap’s existence in a city predicated on rationality. No longer relatable

to surrounding productive articulations of space, the gap finds itself outside the symbolic order of the

city.

Absences The physical ruin and the symbolic gap together comprise an absence when considered as a unit. The

term refers to the separation from the spatial and symbolic orders of the city: Because all structures in a

city have a role to play in the spatial practice of the city, a function to be carried out and

communicated through the symbolic articulations of their forms, the ruin and the silent gap results in

an “absence”14 in the physical and symbolic order, yielding an inability to articulate spatial narratives

of identity.

Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió calls these marginalised gaps terrains vagues, describing

their “unincorporated margins,” “un-productive,” and “foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior

in the physical interior of the city, its negative image.”15 This positioning facilitates the gap’s inherently

liminal position, most visibly noticeable in its physical (ruined) state: Although we can determine how

the space once articulated itself through the ruin that occupies it, its current state is inherently

                                                                                                               13 Eco, “Function and Sign," 187. 14 Henry Somers-Hall, “The Concept of Ruin: Sartre and the Existential City,” Urbis Research Forum Review 1, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 17. 15 Ignasi De Solà-Morales, “Terrain Vague,” in Anyplace, ed. Cynthia C Davidson (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1995), 120.

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ambiguous. And even though it is positioned physically within the city, it is also without it, in terms of

spatial practice, as well as spatial and symbolic order.

Dr Helen Armstrong, who draws strongly upon the work of de Solà-Morales in her defence of

absence,16 also considers its temporal liminality. She examines the inherent ambiguity of the absence’s

temporal element by describing a space where “past, present and future shimmer…making uncanny

and seamless connections,” but also where “tendrils …insinuate into the future, probing and clinging

like vines on old walls.”17 This description bears strong allusions to the Classical ruin, which ultimately

realises the often-illustrated notion of vines overtaking their crumbling walls. This natural destination of

the ruin is used in her metaphor to imply that the gap’s suspension in liminality is but a stage, similar to

Victor Turner’s description of liminality as a process. Just as the last stage of his description was one of

reincorporation, so can the gap — eventually, and with external intervention — be rejoined again with

the social order.18

But otherwise suspended, the undefined space of the absence is one of liminality in light of de Solà-

Morales’ definition: “The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom,

of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains

vagues…Absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.”19

                                                                                                               16 Armstrong uses the term ‘void’ to describe absences, though her general use of the term does not significantly differ from mine. However, I choose to avoid it because of its connotations of irreversibility and meaninglessness. 17 Helen Armstrong, “Time, Dereliction and Beauty: An Argument for ‘Landscapes of Contempt’,” in The Landscape Architect (presented at the International Federation of Landscape Architects, Sydney: IFLA, 2006), 117. 18 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage,” in Betwixt & Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, ed. Louise Carus Mahdi, Steven Foster, and Meredith Little (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1987), 3–19. 19 Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Terrain Vague,” 120.

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Chapter Two Memory, Architecture, Articulation

In the city, memory and identity are intertwined, feeding into and reflecting each other. Sociologist

Maurice Halbwachs, one of the first theorists of collective memory, suggested that collective memory

serves as a framework within which individual memories are formed and related. Without this

collective structure to receive and code individual memories, they are unintelligible: “A person who

alone remembers what others do not resembles someone who sees what others do not see. He is in

certain respects like a person suffering from hallucinations.”20 It is not surprising, then, that parallels

can be made between the framework of collective memory and architecture:

Just as an architectural grid serves as a framework for composition, allowing variation and a hierarchy of elements within a homogeneous order, individual memories may be said to fit into a larger ordered framework, the events and experiences that a collective holds in common. Just as the architectural composition needs an ordering device such as the grid, the fragments of individual memory require the order of the collective if they are to be intelligible.21

When a traumatic event occurs, the framework of collective memory works to develop an identity for it

by drawing from individual memories a narrative arc within which the individual can fit their

experience of the event:

Richard Brilliant…noted that we would all have differing memories of the events of September 11. ‘It could have no singular shape or identity’ even though we all witnessed the same event in much the same way, for the majority of us, through the medium of television. The deliberate collection of these individual memories to form the collective memory constitutes, Brilliant says, ‘the essential meaning of the public, commemorative monument.’22

In this sentence, whether taken literally or figuratively (that is, whether the ‘monument’ referred to is a

physical one or the interpretation of the collective memory’s narrative), Brilliant alludes to the

intersection of memory and architecture. This is, at first, a difficult concept to reconcile: How can a

physical form, experienced in space, articulate what is intangible and recalled from one’s own mind?

Armstrong, in her discussion of memory and the void, positions the two concepts oppositionally:

“Intangible memory is dependent upon a mental operation, the recall of past images, while architecture

is understood phenomenologically through extension in space, its immediacy and its materiality.”23

However, Edge and Weiner suggest that both this inherent contradiction and its resolution can be

found in the space between the Cartesian res cogitans (the thinking thing, in this case the realm of

                                                                                                               20 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 74. 21 Kay F. Edge and Frank H. Weiner, “Collective Memory and the Museum,” in Images, Representations and Heritage, ed. Ian Russell (Springer US, 2006), http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-387-32216-7_9. 223. 22 Ibid., 225. 23 Ibid., 226.

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memory as a product of mind’s cogito) and res extensa24 (extended thing, or the corporeal — in this case,

the tangibility of structure). The dilemma arrives in the attempt to reconcile the cogito, or what one

knows to be true because one exists (memory is a mental by-product of one’s existence and therefore

one knows it to be true) and what one knows to be true because they have experienced it, the apriori of

space and matter (architecture). The intersection of these two axes in the space between the dual res

“hesitatingly houses memory,” 25 imbuing space with the cognitas of existence. For philosopher Henri

Bergson, all depends on this intersection: Nothing is independent of spatial context or the objects that

construe it. On its own, matter is hollow and only a surface. Bergson’s famous sentence in his

introduction to the seminal Matter and Memory, “Memory is the intersection of mind and matter,”26

suggests memory can be imbued in the space in which it is experience.

But it is finally Walter Benjamin who finally bridges the gap between Armstrong and Bergson, between

res cognitas and res extensa. Like Bergson, he places memory within a context of material spatiality,

asserting it is “unmistakably present” in the material object, but he also suggests that intellect in and of

itself (the cognitas) cannot “fully incorporate memory” — it depends on the material object existing in a

spatial context to generate “image flashes of memory that are true pictures of the past.”27

This spatial aspect of collective memory is crucial because it informs narratives of identity in the city

through architectural forms. Because collective memory’s many layers can never be represented

literally, much less simultaneously, through architecture, such efforts are largely conceptual and

abstract:28 They must be represented symbolically rather than physically.

According to Nora, while history is attached to events, memory is attaches itself to space and sites, most

notably through social ritual (which can realistically encompass any repeated action in the spatial

practice of the city, from daily commuting patterns to opening the door of a structure in order to gain

entrance) creates lieux de mémoire,29 Memory is thus mapped and symbolically coded into these sites in

the city ordered through social ritual in a dynamic process that “becomes part and parcel of the on-

going project of establishing individual and group identities.”30

The building communicates these amalgamated cultural memories and meanings as narratives of

identity through its form, the secondary function of the building. It is important to note that, according

to Bergson, from the moment structure-as-matter comes into contact with the memory to be imbued in

its context, the structure forever escapes “the possibility of fixed representation,” because the collective

memory that informs it is composed of “multiple and infinite layers.”31 The constant influx of memory

                                                                                                               24 Ibid., 226 25 Ibid. 26 Henri Bergson, introduction to Matter and Memory (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1911), xii. http://ia700502.us.archive.org/11/items/matterandmemory00berguoft/matterandmemory00berguoft.pdf. 27 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 160. 28 Edge and Weiner, “Collective Memory and the Museum,” 234. 29 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7. 30 Nuala C. Johnson, “Public Memory,” in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. James Duncan, Richard H. Schein, and Nuala C. Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 323. 31 Nikolina Bobic, “Belgrade in Formation(s): Dobrovic’s Generalstab Complex,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 21, no. 1 (August 12, 2013): 12, doi:10.1080/10331867.2012.10739933.

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as a result of interactions with space continually shift, inform and alter the meanings imbued in the

structure. Barthes’ Eiffel Tower speaks to this process when discussing the tower as a signifier of

meaning, “i.e. of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their

knowledge, their dreams, their history), without this meaning thereby ever being finite and fixed. Who

can say what the Tower will be for humanity tomorrow?”32 Eco also articulates the changeable nature

of the narratives communicated through architecture, writing about the imbued “codes and subcodes

as making different readings possible in the course of history.”33

Thus articulated, it is clear that the process of identity-formation via sites, or more specifically lieux de

mémoire, is not a one-way communicative process. Buildings do not simply communicate narratives of

identity coded into them by the architect, as an overly simplistic reading of Eco would perhaps suggest.

Instead, by calling upon Bergson, Barthes and Benjamin, the process becomes a conversation, with

structures acting as transmission hub through which individual memory and meaning are gathered and

incorporated into the pre-existing layered framework, or coding, of collective memory, before being

communicated back as narratives of identity.

It can be surmised that when a building in a city is intact, and surrounded by buildings that are also

intact, there results both a physical and symbolic order — though a changing, dynamic one — to the

space in the city, and messages articulating narratives of identity can be received via the secondary

function of the building. In the traumatised city, then, what happens to this juncture? Because in our

spatial practice we interact with architecture (whose nature and essence is inherently a product of form

and function) through its function, our ability to communicate with the structure is inhibited once the

function is destroyed. We can no longer encode our memories into the collective framework coded into

the architecture: Individual concepts of the city become disjointed, and bereft of function, the structure

loses its place in not only the spatial practice of the city but is excluded from the symbolic order:

Current narratives of identity can no longer be articulated without new input, and without the ability to

articulate, the ruined building is silent, producing an absence.

However, this does not mean the memories already coded within the structure are lost at the moment

of ruination. Indeed, Armstrong explicitly states that absences are spaces inherently “containing

uncomfortable memories.”34 A ruin is the structure devoid of function, but not altogether of form. If, as

Benjamin suggests, memory is dependent on the generation of image flashes — the image itself a

simulacra or form of the object it represents — then the “true pictures of the past,”35 or the memories

that result as a product of these flashes, are based on image-as-form/form-as-image. The memory

within the now-ruined building is a memory of the image or the form of the performance of the ruin’s

past function. In a ghostly way, form still communicates function, even in the void, through the

structure-as-receptacle for memory.

                                                                                                               32Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” 5. 33 Eco, “Function and Sign,” 190. 34 Armstrong, “Time, Dereliction and Beauty,” 117. These “uncomfortable memories” be addressed at greater length in Chapter 4.4. 35 Edge and Weiner, “Collective Memory and the Museum,” 224.

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In her discussion of post-Communist Eastern European ruins, Anca Pusca writes that with the

ruination of structures into a condition of absence comes a dismantling of both social order and

identity: “Along with the buildings, it was not just an ideology – mass utopia…- that went crumbling,

but also a particular collective and individual identity, a social order that sustained life both

physically…as well as emotionally – through the communities and solidarity that emerged within

them.”36 Only memory, still residing in the silenced form of the ruin, is left to call out through

Benjamin’s image-flashes.

                                                                                                               36 Anna Pusca, “Industrial and Human Ruins of Postcommunist Europe,” Space and Culture 13, no. 3 (August 2010): 241.

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Chapter Three The Collapse of Order

Bereft of border, boundary, function and fitting form, the post-conflict ruin lies surrounded by its city in

its contradictory state. A building is a social space in the Lefebvrian notion, and space is an

amalgamation of time as it pertains to the collective dating of its included objects: A fast ruin is

therefore time arrested, hardened wax on a snuffed-out candle. One knows that it began to harden the

moment the flame was extinguished, but one cannot separate it from the candle nor date it on its own.

It is a building that is cut off suddenly from life, but not yet entrenched in the decay that comes with

death. As a structure that exists in intermediate states of ontology, physicality and temporality, a ruin is

a liminal structure in an otherwise purposeful cityscape.

1. The creation of the ruin and the physical collapse of order The transformation to a liminal state is simple: As Victor Turner’s conceptualisation goes, something

becomes liminal after it has been separated from the social order.37 In the case of a fast ruin, this is

accomplished via the explosion that creates it. A bomb goes off. Glass windows shatter in their frames

and mix in shards below, remaining not the ‘east window’ and ‘west window’ of the building but

becoming simply ‘broken windows.’ A coffee mug set down a moment ago falls on the table built a

generation ago. The table splinters, scattering across a century-old floor that implodes under the weight

of the crumbling walls, carrying all this, the great accumulation of humanity, to the structure’s

centuries-old foundations. What has been done over centuries has been un-done in the time it takes for

a flame to sputter and die.

With the collapse of a building comes the dissolution of its boundaries that define interiority and

exteriority, inside and outside, and public and private. When Walter Benjamin toured Naples in 1924

with his partner Asja Lacis, his descriptor for the city’s dilapidated architecture was “porosity,” a word

suggested by Lacis.38 It implies a leakage across a membrane, of materials exiting and entering between

two distinct spaces. But pores are not a membranes unto themselves; they are rather the vacancy of a

boundary within the boundary itself. The exterior and interior bleed into each other in this way, Benjamin

and Lacis write in “Naples”: “Just as the living room reappears on the street…so the street migrates

into the living room.”39

In the ruin of the structure and the accompanying collapse of boundaries, function and form are

inherently rent apart, prey to the porosity of ruination. “Intact buildings segregate functions. In ruined

                                                                                                               37 Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” 38 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 26. 39 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 171.

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buildings, disparate functions congregate, out of place with each other,” writes Ginsberg.40 The

destruction of the physical structure of the ruin is therefore implicit in the destruction of its function —

one collapses with the other. There is now the inability to distinguish between functions and forms, or

indeed to even identify functions to their form. In this state, the ruined structure inevitably loses its

function. Without function in a purpose-built city, the ruin is irrational: It has neither place in the

spatial order of the city nor in its social practice.

The rationality of architecture, of the physical order it is part of, is collapsed. The lack of boundaries,

definition and rationality plunge the spatial order into a state of “spatial anarchy, social intermingling,

and, above all, impermanence… Definition, imprint is avoided. No situation appears intended to last

forever; no form claims to be ‘so, and not otherwise.”41 This can be seen as a condition of intermediacy

and ambiguity outside of the social order of the city — in other words, as existing within a condition of

liminality.

ii. The creation of the gap and the symbolic collapse of order Eco’s primary and secondary functions of architecture implies that with the collapse of the primary

function of architecture comes the collapse of the secondary one, or its symbolic articulation. And to

Bergson’s horror, with form outside of its spatial context and reduced only to matter, the meaning once

imbued in the ruin and contained by form’s boundaries now finds itself without the material object to

which it once attached itself and through which it articulated its narratives.

This resultant gap represents a symbolic reflection of the trauma that created it: They are sites of

“broken narration,” a “rupture”42 of language that is, writes Derek Gregory, intimately connected to

the destruction of the city. Without code to articulate the memories imbued in the structure, and

without a plausible avenue for new ones to be incorporated into the framework of collective memory

incorporated into it as a liéux de memoire, the gap symbolically transitions from its former state of form

following function to a state of form without function. The gap cannot articulate for itself amidst the

collapse of spatial order and its own liminal physicality and temporality: There is no code, no syntax

with which to compose the narratives the structure would normally articulate. Furthermore, in a

reflection of the physical form’s own liminality, the scattering of meaning in the ruins disables the

structure from being able to identity for itself: Its efforts to speak are incomprehensible, and the

vocabulary and syntax that once composed a symbolic articulation is missing. There is no language to

describe it as is its now, caught between states and apart from the social order. In this state, ruined

structures lose their ability to effectively communicate: Without form, the structure cannot promote

function; without this promotion, there is no communication.

                                                                                                               40 Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2004). 41 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. 26. 42 Derek Gregory, “‘Doors into Nowhere’: Dead Cities and the Natural History of Destruction,” in Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View, ed. Peter Meusburger, Michael J. Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder (New York City: Springer, 2010), 264.

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In this state of total collapse, the absence is born: Physical distinctions between structure and street

have been erased via the collapse of physical boundaries, and meaning can no longer be contained in

the structure. Hovering outside of the spatial practice, arrested in time, lacking function and symbolic

language and expression, the liminal absence’s “anarchy”43 reigns in its physical and symbolic

disconnect from the order of the city.

                                                                                                               43 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 26.

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Chapter Four The Uncanny Absence

As both physical and semiotic entities, liminal and impossible to read, these traumatic scars can be

characterised as uncanny. This new characteristic prohibits interaction with, or the reading of, the

space through the confrontational relationship it develops with those exposed to the gap. Those who

attempt to interact with the absence find their efforts frustrated: They can no longer perform the

function promoted by (what is left of) the form; they might not even recognise the structure-as-such.

These are all points Bergson excellently articulates in his bookshelf metaphor:

If I choose a volume in my library at random, I may put it back on the shelf after glancing at it and say, ‘This is not verse.’ Is this what I have really seen in turning over the leaves of the book? Obviously not. I have not, and I never shall see, an absence of verse. I have seen prose.44

In other words, writes Somers-Hall, Bergson implies that the absence fails to live up to our expectations

of what should be there.45 To add to the disorientation, there is no signification for what one should now

do with the building: Signifiers and signs are in chaos, and confusion reigns. “Trauma revolves around

the disorientation of its sufferers,” writes Antonious Robben in his book on traumatised societies,46 and

in the unrecognizable ruinscape, there is no possibility of orientation because the frame of reference

exploded with the building. The house that was once here is now not here but reduced to bricks here and here and here.

The window that once belonged to that building is now in pieces next to this one. Street signs are warped out of

shape and functions that were once assigned to a now-ruined building are relocated to another

building, if at all. In part, cognitive understanding fails because there is no way to express the scene

before them: Because meaning can no longer be coded into the once-structure or articulated through it,

there is in the absence an overwhelming “inability to make the ruined landscape meaningful.”47 As

Gregory then illustrates through Peter Ho Davies’ description in Davies’ novel The Welsh Girl,

Esther stares out at the ruins around her…A single gutted house still stands at the end of one flattened terrace like an exclamation mark, and she suddenly sees the streets as sentences in a vast book, sentences that have their nouns and verbs scored through, rubbed out, until they no longer make any sense.48

This situation where all is anarchy and “cognitive understanding fails,”49 thus goes hand-in-hand with

the failure of language to describe the trauma of the ruinscape, to collect the scattered letters and

                                                                                                               44 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, E-book (Project Gutenberg, 1911), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26163. 45 Henry Somers-Hall, “The Concept of Ruin: Sartre and the Existential City,” Urbis Research Forum Review 1, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 17. 46 Antonius C.G. Robben, “How Traumatized Societies Remember: The Aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War,” Cultural Critique 59 (Winter 2005): 146. 47 Derek Gregory, “‘Doors into Nowhere’: Dead Cities and the Natural History of Destruction,” in Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View, ed. Peter Meusburger, Michael J. Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder (New York City: Springer, 2010), 263. 48 Peter Ho Davies, The Welsh Girl (London: Sceptre, 2007), 282, qtd. in Gregory, "Doors into Nowhere," 264. 49 Robben, “How Traumatized Societies Remember,” 164.

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punctuation that are spread across formerly recognisable streets. It is difficult to reconcile this liminal,

disorientating landscape with the memories of the past, the everyday lived out this a seemingly fixed

backdrop. “The incomprehensible invades consciousness and disturbs the precarious balance of the

everyday,” writes Robben.50 In the chaotic absence, one is confronted with the strange in what once

was familiar, the hallmark of the uncanny, or das Unheimliche. “On the collective level, the uncanny also

continued to intrude upon the present because large outbreaks of violence equally fail human

comprehension since meaningless destruction is endemic to trauma,” writes Robben.51

The intrusion is exacerbated by the falling-out of the absence from the cityscape, its inarticulate

purposelessness in the purpose-driven structure of the city: The ironic pointlessness of leftover “stairs,

windows, and towers keep[ing] up their efforts within a building that has lost its purpose” creates this

inherent sense of uncanny “out-of-placeness,” writes noted ruins scholar Robert Ginsberg.52

Where there was once familiarity and purpose, there is now strangeness and purposelessness in the

absence’s quotidian existence outside of normative social, aesthetic and spatial regulations, which

creates the unpleasant disorientation and uncanniness that Robben describes. This shift in interacting

with and (futilely) attempting to place meaning in a space facilitates a new relationship between viewer

and structure. This relationship is initially a confrontational one due to the uncanniness of the ruin,

which Andrew Miller describes as an assault, “forcibly present but inadequately recognised.”53

More specifically, this uncanny relationship between viewer and ruin can be derived from three

characteristics of the absence. First, the failure to find meaning in the building-as-such. Ruins are

identifiable by what they were, a connection that draws upon inherently personal memories of the

building’s former purpose in the city’s articulation. But as discussed earlier, the collapse of the structure

is a collapse of boundary that destroys function and order: “In ruined buildings, disparate functions

congregate, out of place with each other.”54 Yet the function itself is no longer viable: In a ruin, it is

rather an indication of function that remains, not the possibility of the function itself. The destruction of

the function, the porosity of the building and the invisible suddenly becoming visible destroys the

assignation of purpose to space, or spatial order. This “being out of place” replaces order with

“noteworthy confrontation,” writes Ginsberg.55

The physical dissolution of boundary between structure and street is accompanied by the symbolic

dissolution of language created by the disorientating nature of the ruin and the accompanying inability

to process it. The connection that residents have with ruins is thus of the past tense: This is where the park

was. This is the building in which I once worked. But now, with no way of interacting with the ruin per the

form’s original signification intent and purpose, those the building held meaning for recall memories

                                                                                                               50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 146-147 52 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins. 51. 53 Andrew Miller, “Prosecuting Arguments: The Uncanny and Cynicism in Cultural History,” Cultural Critique no. 29 (Winter 1994-1995), 175. 54 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins. 51. 55 Ibid.

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exposed by the dissolution of boundaries: Benjamin’s image-flashes call out to them, but the bridge that

once existed to bind the memory to the space and articulate this meaning is gone.

Secondly, there is the act of looking itself. A key part of the assault is in the uncanny ruin’s competing

dualities of repulsion and attraction. One cannot look, but one can also not look away. Architecture is

built on the promise/premise of utopia: That is, cities are planned as they would be in the best of all

worlds and buildings are built according to a vision of perfect idealism for that space. “Space, and the

built environment in general, has always been connected to certain notions of human utopia, whether

social, economical, or political,”56 writes Pusca in her examination of post-Communist ruins. A ruin

then, is a “dismantling of that utopia,”57 a transformation from this vision into a dystopic one that

confronts the viewer with its connotations of the collapse of social order and identity that crumbled

with the structure itself. Thus the ruin’s liminality is a key cause of this oscillation of gaze and glance:

According to Trigg’s discussion of Ginsberg’s Aesthetics of Ruins, it is the ruin’s unpredictable dynamism,

its shifting balance on either end of a scale of being that causes ruins to oscillate between “seduction

and repulsion.”58

Third, there is the uncanny inherent in the relationship of the ruined building and the space around it,

as experienced by the viewer. Just as the ruin usurps order by the dissolution of boundaries, the “ruin

replaces order with incongruity,”59 Ginsberg writes. “Ruin incongruity is linked to anachronism,

anomaly, ambiguity, irony, and uncanniness.”60 This inherent Unheimliche of the structure itself is

intensified and called to notice by its positioning in the city space. Next to a ruin could be a fully intact

house, a glass performing arts centre, or an untouched library. The juxtapositions of productive and

unproductive space, of form and function and form without function, of spatial practice and liminality

exist clumsily together, like puzzle pieces with bent edges. The panorama is no longer seamless, the

distant vision no longer continuous, the close-up no longer without edges. This incongruity is what

Ginsberg attributes to the creation of the ruin’s out-of-placeness.61

1. The potential of the liminal Unheimliche With such an adversarial relationship, it seems almost impossible that the absence would ever be able to

be re-incorporated back into the social order of the city. But although these absences could be

considered ‘residual or unproductive’ in their purposelessness, DeSilvey and Edensor demonstrated in

their examination that they were still ‘open to appropriation and recuperation.’ This potential stems

from the gap’s liminal state, which is one of intermediacy (intermediate — “between forms”): Far from

being permanent, the very cause of its uncanniness is also its key to escape its suspension. Because it is

                                                                                                               56 Anna Pusca, “Industrial and Human Ruins of Postcommunist Europe,” Space and Culture 13, no. 3 (August 2010): 241. 57 Ibid. 58 Dylan Trigg, “The Aesthetics of Ruins,” review of The Aesthetics of Ruins, by Robert Ginsberg, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 5. 59 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, 51. 60 Ibid., also mentions the translation of das Unheimliche, meaning ‘not homey,’ ‘ill-at-homeness.’ 61 Ibid.

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impossible to rewind the traumatic process that destroyed it, the ruin must progress from its liminal

stage and move on to its next state (also, incarnation), ultimately representing not only physical form,

but the narratives of identity articulating from it.

The springboard for this ultimately comes from a change in interaction with the absence. In order to

make sense of the useless, irrational object in the city, to save it from the uncanny condition of

ambiguity that results from form without function, eventually people must assign the structure symbolic

meaning in order to incorporate it into the spatial practice of the city.62 This is enabled by the constant

physical presence of the absence, which gradually facilitates desensitization by gradually ingratiating

itself into the visible order of the city, an act passively accepted by the everyday passer-by for whom the

ruin insists on becoming familiar through its continued visibility.

In doing so its characteristic Unheimliche is reversed: The strange once again becomes familiar.

Eventually, writes Ginsberg, “We are at home in strange circumstances…the strangeness of the ruin

becomes familiar”63 The familiar takes meaning for us in our interactions with it. To interact with an

object is to imbue meaning upon it via the interaction itself: It is both an acknowledgement of existence

and acceptance that opens it to potential action. When absence becomes familiar, it becomes a “latent

place where [its] absence of use can create a sense of freedom and expectancy — the space of the

possible.”64 But the meanings assigned will be different from the ones assigned before: The absence has

stood apart from order while remaining part of the city’s context, as viewed in the light of the functional

buildings for whom the absence is context. Because of this uncanny placement, adjustments have been

made in the spatial practice of the city that inevitably result in new memories considered in an forever-

in-flux cultural memory, which has been impacted significantly as a result of the trauma. Ultimately,

changed meanings will be derived and associated with the absence, even if, like Barthes’ Eiffel Tower,

they are purely symbolic.

Yet this meaning is not complete if there is no form to facilitate its articulation, no function through

which the building can finally, once again, be rationalized. In the case of Barthes’ Tower, the

“useless”65 structure is made rational by its nature as “pure signifier”; that is to say, its function is that of

being the symbol for Paris; its purpose is to articulate the identity of the city by being both physical

manifestation of the symbolic city and the symbolic manifestation of the physical city. The Eiffel Tower

is Paris; Paris is the Eiffel Tower. This is a rare case, however; it is more likely there will be a call for a

repurposing of the ruin, a rebuilding of form that carries with it a primary function, or utilitas, to justify

its rationality and legitimise it in the social and spatial orders of the purpose-built, rational city.

The physical reconstruction and re-assignation of meaning thus restores physical and symbolic order to

the absence-turned-structure, facilitating its reincorporation into the spatial practice of the city and

ability to once again participate in the two-way communication system that articulates identity. Indeed,

                                                                                                               62 Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower," 6. 63 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins. 52. 64 Armstrong, “Time, Dereliction and Beauty," 118. 65 Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” 5.

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as a liminal structure, the terrain vague is “fundamental to the evocative potential of the city,” writes

Armstrong.66 In this inherently transformed state, the absence is replaced by the creation of a new

architecture in which space and memory can intersect once again, and, in a symbolic light, the “broken

narration” of the absence is repaired. Whole again, the restored and transformed structure can speak

once more.

                                                                                                               66 Armstrong, “Time, Dereliction and Beauty,” 118.

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Chapter F ive Current Narratives of Identity in Belgrade and Berlin

As covered in previous chapters, the re-assignation of meaning facilitates the reincorporation of the

absence into the syntax of the post-conflict city through both physical and symbolic reconstruction. The

spaces no longer articulate the same meaning they once had, in part because their form, if not also their

function, has changed through reconstructive efforts — though it may or may not articulate the

building’s original utilitas, it will at least signify it in a new way due to its new form. These

reincorporated spaces play a key role in articulating identity by drawing upon both physical and

symbolic coding present in the new structure, and it is in this section that the narratives articulated by

reincorporated spaces in post-conflict Belgrade and post-reunificaton Berlin will be explored.

In 1990, after 29 years of living with the Berlin Wall, a physical division between the Soviet East and

Allied Western blocs of the occupied city, Berliners experienced a reunified and autonomous capital for

the first time since before the war. When the Wall came down in 1990, the city was left to grapple with

two significant problems: First, how to reconcile key sites in the distinctively Eastern and Western blocs

of the city and re-incorporate them into the context of the newly unified city? And also, how to create a

new narrative of identity within the urban spatial context that would acknowledge its past role as the

predominant WWII aggressor while disallowing that identity to be overwhelmingly singular. In other

words, how could this ‘new’ Berlin deal with its past and pave the way for a future as a newly unified,

newly democratic city?

As the wall was being torn down in Berlin, the beginnings of a political upheaval were fermenting in

Belgrade, where Yugoslavian president, Serbian Slobodan Milošević, was using his influence to

manipulate the political processes of the Communist state in an attempt to create an even more

centralised government. The resulting secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 led to a series of wars,

carried out on ethno-nationalist lines, intended to arrest further dissolution of the republic. Belgrade

was the political centre from which Milošević carried out almost a decade of attacks — ultimately

encompassing genocide, most notably in Bosnia — and consequently became a symbol for Serbian

aggression. The attack to put an end to the Yugoslav Wars ultimately came in the form of a NATO

bombing campaign that began on 24 March 1999. During the following 78 days, 76 buildings were

ruined and 4,489 damaged,67 marking the fifth time in the 20th century that Belgrade had been bombed

                                                                                                               67 Miloš Perović and Zoran Žegarac, "The Destruction of an Architectural Culture: the 1999 Bombing of Belgrade," Cities 17, no. 6 (2000). 396.

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(two earlier bombings occurred during each of the World Wars),68 and the 40th it had been devastated

in its 2,300-year history.69

As previous chapters have explored, identity is a dynamic characteristic, a state-in-flux: The ebb and

tide of the layers of memory as they constantly engage with physical matter to shape an identity

produces one that is ultimately contextual and therefore in flux. It is thus an equal mistake to assign a

singular narrative of identity to a city’s structures as it is to assume that because the identities of a city

are multiple, that there are no narratives of identity that can be articulated or read. If memory can be

compared to Bergson’s conical model, the largest layer is the one closest to the base, i.e. the most recent

memory. As the most accessible layer, it would logically form the layer matter most engages with,

imposing itself over more distant layers to write itself more distinctly into spatial articulations.

Therefore, it is possible to ascertain perhaps a pre-dominant narrative of identity as articulated through

the building’s symbolic code.

In post-1999 Belgrade, the articulations of three key re-incorporated sites, as well as one

unincorporated one, offer three predominant narratives of identity that speak to different degrees of

resolving the struggles of history and marginalisation it currently deals with. In the following

examination of these articulations, we also compare how three complementary sites in Berlin dealt with

the same struggles and what narratives were articulated as a result.

For cities such as Berlin and Belgrade, engagement with once-traumatised, reincorporated absences

plays a key role in a city’s ability to not only come to terms with their traumatic pasts but also

experience a cathartic effect through the harnessing of the reconstructed ruin’s potential for

redemption. Pusca writes that interaction with liminal absences can tap into a possibility of their

“emotional and redemptive potential: their ability to provide both hope and a new sense of purpose to

the communities that surround them.”70 Although Berlin also struggled with similar issues of ‘owning’

the past and re-articulating new, forward-thinking narratives of identity though its architecture, we will

see that Belgrade is not quite there: Rather, by considering the sites mentioned above, Belgrade will be

revealed as a city that still struggles with its past, one mired in a stagnation of identity and struggles with

a contradictory vision for its future.

                                                                                                               68 Perović and Žegarac, "The Destruction of an Architectural Culture," 396. 69 Ibid. 395. 70 Pusca, “Industrial and Human Ruins of Postcommunist Europe.” 240.

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1. The Narrative of Europeanisation

The first narrative that can be read is one of desire for demarginalisation from the sidelines of the

Other as it pertains to Europeanization.

Haunted by a recent past of genocide and corrupted, undemocratic governments, Belgrade is struggling

to both confront its past and simultaneously project itself as a city that belongs within the European

‘zone of consideration,’ as a capital not to be dismissed as outwith the European Union. Post-Wall,

Berlin was facing the same dilemma: After more than 40 stagnant years, the reunified Berlin was

expected to “act like other European cities”71 in terms of its urban planning and development. This

directive implies not only a comparison, but also a dichotomy of Us versus the Other. This is

particularly apparent in the use of “other” in the sentence, indicating that Berlin was considered

European, but it was also somewhere outside of the characterisation through which the majority of

“Europe” considered itself as largely capitalistic and democratic. The newly unified Berlin, yet to

confront its past of genocide as a unified entity, was caught in a state of limbo between East and West.

In order to articulate a new, Euro-sanctioned identity for the city, it would have to acknowledge its past

and also deliberately reject former ties to articulations of Eastern identities.

Today, Belgrade faces the same challenge, and the Us/Other dichotomy Berlin faced is critical when

considering the case of Belgrade and its efforts to project a European identity. Always culturally and

geographically at the margins of Europe, Belgrade has historically found itself not quite European, but

not quite outside of Europe either. This is not the first call for the Europeanization of Belgrade, nor is it

the first attempt to articulate this identity through architectural renovation. A ‘Europeanizaton of

Belgrade’ was first attempted after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, ending centuries of occupation,

on 8 April 1867.72

This took the form of extensive renovations of downtown spaces, particularly Kneza Milhova, to free

Belgrade of its Ottoman identity articulated in the existing architecture. Serbians associated this with

the ‘Eastern’ — and from a Western Saidian perspective, ‘Other’ — identity of the Ottoman Empire

and therefore preventative of the independent nation being identified as Western and therefore of

Europe. In the demolishment and reconstruction of spaces that formerly articulated the cultural

identity of the Ottoman occupation, Serbians imbued in them new meaning that manifested itself in the

structure’s articulation and consequent contribution to the text of the city. Furthermore, by rejecting

even construction methods used by the Ottoman Empire, the renovations signaled an attempt at

articulating a complete “transformation of the city, its buildings, and economic processes from a Balkan

spirit to a European model”73 — in other words, an attempt to shed themselves of their geographical

and perceived cultural identity in a deliberate effort to be seen as European consideration, via the

                                                                                                               71 E. J. Gittus, “Berlin as a Conduit for the Creation of German National Identity at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Space & Polity 6, no. 1 (2002): 97. 72 Christine Lavrence, “The Serbian Bastille: Memory, Agency, and Monumental Public Space in Belgrade,” Space and Culture 8, no. 1 (February 2005): 36. 73 Ibid.

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symbolic articulation of the city’s new, ‘Western’ architecture. Even today, Kneza Milhova evokes Paris

or Madrid in its open plazas, wide pedestrian boulevards and ornate balconies and cupolas.

While the regional distinction of “Balkans” had largely disappeared from popular rhetoric and self-

perception during the years from WWII to the late 1980s, it was during the first seeds of the

Yugoslavian conflict that the phrase began reappearing in the public discourse. 74 An article appearing

in Sarajevan daily Osloboŏenje in September 1990 was one of the first to re-position Balkans as against

Europe in much the same way as Edward Said famously positions the Orient against the Occidental.

Perceiving the upcoming conflict, the author wrote, “Thus, instead of being an integral part of Europe,

we are again becoming the Balkans, we are sinking into it equally in Ljubljana as well as in Zagreb, in

Belgrade…in Priština and Skopje.”75

Post-Yugoslav Conflict, Belgrade once again finds itself attempting to free itself of this dichotomy.

Outside of the ‘genuine Europe,’ Belgrade (and the Western Balkans) find themselves barely

incorporated into European consideration, and any such incorporation, writes Maria Tordorova, has

been “late, partial and unequal.”76 Crucially, the Saidian notion of Belgrade’s suspension between West

and East is not only an external perception, but today continues to be internalized in the rhetoric of

Serbians themselves. An uncited Serbian essay quoted by Tordorova in Imagining the Balkans, articulates

they view themselves at the crossroads of West and the East, due to “different cultures, languages,

traditions and even civilizations.”77 Furthermore, the author draws an unintentional parallel to Berlin

as a city in which the West came into conflict with the East via the city’s symbolic division, where the

West was placed adjacently to the Iron Curtain of the Soviet bloc. Though it has moved

geographically, the symbolism and existence of the divide is still intact: “The demarcation line, which

during the cold war was called ‘the iron curtain,’ is the same where several centuries ago the Turkish

conquering whirlpool had stooped and which had saved the West from violence and assimilation.”78

Belgrade was as far West as the Ottoman Empire ever spread.

The contemporary desire in Belgrade for Europeanisation as articulated through a rejection of the East

is largely articulated in the cases of voids that have been re-assigned meaning by repurposing them

through reconstructive efforts. Having shed their marginality through the re-assignation of function,

they can once again re-form as newly ‘Westernized’ structures into the physical and social orders of the

city. To examine this process, we hold the example of Belgrade’s reconstruction of the Usce tower up

for examination, contrasting it with the transformation of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, both of which

negated their old identities through the reconstruction of purely commercial centres driven by the free

market.

                                                                                                               74 Maria Tordorova, Imagining the Balkans, updated (New York City: Oxford University Press USA, 1999), 53. 75 Ibid., 57. 76 Ibid., 57. 77 Qtd. in Ibid., 57. 78 Ibid.

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Usce Tower

Situated as the lone tower at the gateway to Novi Sad, the Socialist-planned quarter of town meant to

embody its political principles, the Tower was first constructed in XXX as the headquarters for the

Yugoslavian Communist Party.

The former Yugoslavian Communist party headquarters was destroyed in the early days of the 1999

NATO bombing campaign, an attack that not only took out the physical structure in an effort to

destroy its primary function (utilitas) as the heart of government party operations. When considered

through Saidian lens, it can also be viewed as a deliberate attack on the ‘Eastern’ political and

economic structure articulated via the secondary function of the building, especially when given its

symbolic positioning in the city.

In a complete act of severance with its former identity, the tower today has been rebuilt as a rejection of

its former incarnation as a physical and symbolic Communist headquarters into a notable hi-rise

building modelled after skyscrapers in New York City. The tower stands as a testament to

commercialism, housing multiple corporate offices and retail offices, as well as restaurants, gyms and

living space that cater to an elite created by a (relatively) free-market economy.

Potsdamer Platz

In Berlin, Potsdamer Platz is also notable in its complete rejection of its past narratives of identity. In its

renovation, there was a deliberate attempt to break ties with the past by creating a commercially driven

zone outside of any “urban and national context,”79 in other words, a deliberate rejection of any

attempt to articulate a specific narrative of socio-political identity, which, Gittus writes, was likely not

necessary for the ‘abstract’ processes of ‘consumer development’ and the free market.80 “The City

government was determined to prove that there could be an urban development site in Berlin that did

not need to refer constantly to the negative depths of the German past.”81 The space that was created,

therefore, was a purely economic one, that through its avoidance of history and any identity-related

context, acted as a ‘pure’ commercial zone that could safely accommodate competing national

interests, including those countries that might formerly have had competing political interests in the city

itself.

The fierce competition of free-market participants to establish themselves in this space indicated a new

turn for the re-unified city. Vying for attention is no accidental turn of phrase by Gittus82 to describe

the re-construction of the Platz: The phrasing mimics the free market and quest for dominance of a

market sector, and it is through both their American form and this architectural competition that the

                                                                                                               79 Gittus, “Berlin as a Conduit for the Creation of German National Identity at the End of the Twentieth Century.” 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 102.

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new identity of Berlin as a hub for European free market exchange is articulated. Economic interests

from multinational corporations were now vested stakeholders in the city and its future, and seemed to

symbolise this desire for a future as an economic centre in Western Europe.

Overall, the reconstructions of the Usce Tower and Potsdamer Platz articulatee the desire for an

identity independent and at odds with the identities it had articulated previously: Only a break with the

past could potential set Belgrade on a new course, as it did with Berlin — Gittus goes so far to describe

Potsdamer Platz as a site in which “past and present has been brutally severed.” 83 By focusing on

skyscapers and hi-rises similar to those that dominate the skylines of American cities and ignoring

historical precedent in the architecture of the development, both sites evaded opportunity for any sort

of contextual urban or national identity to be articulated in the development.

2. The Narrative of victimisation In an attempt to deal with trauma, often an approach of memorialising a site related to the trauma is

utilised; or if no such site is available, a space can be created in which the function of memorial can be

fulfilled. Memorialisation provides the opportunity for a community to attempt to make sense of a

trauma by providing a receptacle for individual memories that can be thus stitched into the collective

framework that Hawlbachs indicated in Chapter 2 is critical to making sense of common experiences.

In the spaces of Berlin and Belgrade, efforts can be observed to articulate an identity through

memorialization. Insofar as memorialization is both a physical and symbolic representation of memory,

identity can be articulated in what a city chooses to memorialize and also in how it chooses to represent

that memory. To memorialize something, it must be recognized by the people of the city as worthy;

that is, the event or person in question must be a part of the collective memory of the city.

By providing a specific site for the harnessing of specific collective memories, it is possible that, once

again, predominant narratives can be read in how the collective memory deals with the trauma

through the way in which memory is articulated through the space.

But when there is no designated space for a specified memorial, yet there exists an overwhelming

cultural need to memorialise an event, meaning can be collected in and projected from a related

structure that otherwise lacks function in the city. The ruin, useless, with trauma still writ large on its

form, and the desire to make sense of makes an obvious choice for the collection of cultural memory

and contemplation of the past: When an absence is meaningfully reincorporated back into the city, as

Armstrong suggested it can be, without any alterations to its form, its function necessarily becomes a

reflection of the meanings projected onto it.

Compared to reconstructed and re-incorporated sites, which Armstrong considers a futile attempt to

create “Photoshop made real”84 (an ultimately Panglossian undertaking) but allows us to “gloss over the

                                                                                                               83 Ibid. 103. 84 Armstrong, “Time, Dereliction and Beauty: An Argument for ‘Landscapes of Contempt’.” 116.

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recent past by the sheen of their present,”85 the intermediacy of the absence in a site, particularly a

memorial, enables reflection “on our recent past, the present and also future landscapes…”86 (emphasis

mine), suggesting their role as holders of collective memory and potential to facilitate consideration of

past, present and future. In Bergson’s conical representation of memory, the ability to interact with

memory in the spatial context would be greater in the ruin-as-memorial because there is less distance

between the space and the memory: In the ruin, the dissolution of boundaries uncover memory,

allowing it to filter through. The built structure has no such inherent stores, and memory must be

filtered through the construct of the design.

With this re-assignation of meaning to the absence, the ruins take on a new function — that of memory

— communicated via the form. Coded in these ruins is not just the memory of the destruction of the

structure itself, but also of related memories regarding the war, and this provides a vehicle through

which “we can commune with ‘place’ as a layered landscape — complex and disturbing as much as

reassuring.”87 The relationship is still a confrontational one, where we continue to find ourselves at

odds with the uncanny present in the form: “Here we can regain the ability to accept the ‘ugly’ and

learn from its strange and resonating qualities.”88 In the realm of the liminal absence, the past becomes

a force ‘“through which all presents pass.’”89 In the reincorporated ruin, then, we can only consider the

present in light of the tangible past, as articulated, in this case, by the form of the ruin.

But for Belgrade, a city not yet ready to ‘own’ its role in enacting trauma that resulted in retaliation,

these sites lend themselves easily to a narrative of victimization: If guided toward only considering the

present in light of the visible past, and what is visible is the ruined form, then the conception of the

present as filtered through the past is one of passivity, of a present that was ‘done unto us’ as ruin was

done onto the structure.

This narrative of victimhood, the feeling of unjust blame and injury, is present in Belgrade’s ruins that

are left standing, lacking plans to renovate or rebuilt. Nowhere is this pervasive sentiment better

expressed than in the words of Serbian professor Milan Prodanovic: During the 1999 bombing

campaign, “Belgrade’s citizens became victims of a campaign waged against their city by national

regimes indifferent or hostile to their plight, and the ‘collateral damage’ they suffered — the literal as

well as figurative fallout from the bombardments — was undertaken with full foreknowledge of the

results.”90

Tašmadjan Park

Located in the most central area of the city centre, a small ring known as “Krug Dvojke” after the tram

line that used to encircle it, Tašmajdan Park was built in 1958 and since its construction, has been

                                                                                                               85 Ibid. 119. 86 Ibid. 117. 87 Ibid., 118 88 Ibid. 117-118. 89 Bobic, “Belgrade in Formation(s),” 13. 90 Milan Prodanovic, “Balkan Cities,” in Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention, ed. Joan Ockman ([New York, N.Y.]; Munich; New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University  ; Prestel, 2002), 141.

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popular with locals. It is comprised of eight hectares of green space, bordered by St Mark’s Cathedral

on one side and a smaller park, an offshoot of ‘Taš,’ as it’s locally known. During 2010 and 2011, the

park underwent extensive reconstruction, the funding of which came as a gift from Azerbaijan and

resulted in the airy, well-manicured green space in the centre present today. In the park itself, there are

landscaped gardens with fragrant flowers, jogging paths, outdoor exercise equipment and, significantly

for this space, a large number of playgrounds. From my observations in the park, visited at different

times of the day, it remains a popular gathering spot for families, especially on the weekends and after

services concluded at St Marks. Parents would take advantage of the shade granted by leafy trees on

circles of benches encircling the playgrounds, a series of which formed almost an entire side of the

rectangular park. Others, mostly young people, took advantage of the café near the sports centre on the

opposite side of the park, or ran along the specified jogging trails that weave their way between gardens

and sidewalks.

Among all this activity, it is difficult to find the damage created by the 1999 NATO bombing

campaign. The damage was at first indirect: A children’s theatre in the centre of the park was destroyed

by bombs targeting other buildings at the outskirts of the park. But on 23 April, at 2:20 a.m., NATO

bombed the state-run Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), which operated from the borders of the green

space. The attack killed 16 civilians who were working the nightshift.91 NATO justified the target by

citing the use of RTS buildings and equipment to communicate military information.92 In their

defence of the operation, NATO stated that “We are not targeting the Serb people as we repeatedly

have stated nor do we target President Milosevic personally, we are attacking the control system that is

used to manipulate the military and security forces.”93 But there was a secondary motive to the attacks

as well: the destruction of the station as a vehicle for manufacturing and transmitting government

propaganda,94 and, consequently, a “vital part of President Milosevic’s control mechanism: "[We need

to] directly strike at the very central nerve system of Milosovic’s regime. This of course are those assets

which are used to plan and direct and to create the political environment of tolerance in Yugoslavia in

which these brutalities can not only be accepted but even condoned.”95 The legality of this was

questionable, because “At worst, the Yugoslav government was using the broadcasting networks to

issue propaganda supportive of its war effort: a circumstance which does not, in and of itself, amount to

a war crime,” according to the final report of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former

Yugoslavia to the prosecutor of the NATO bombing campaign review committee — although NATO

earlier alleged the facilities were “used entirely to incite hatred and propaganda.” Ultimately, however,

the committee decided that this secondary reason was but complementary to the primary reason of

                                                                                                               91 “Nato Challenged over Belgrade Bombing,” BBC, October 24, 2001, sec. Europe, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1616461.stm. 92 “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” accessed August 21, 2013, http://www.icty.org/sid/10052#IVB4. 93 Ibid. 94 “Nato Challenged over Belgrade Bombing.” 95 “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

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“disabling the Serbian military command and control system and to destroy the nerve system and

apparatus that keeps Milosević in power.”96

The ruin has been left up as a memorial to the bombing, a visible reminder of the destroyed city and a

space in which the collective memory of that event, as well as its contextual trauma is imbued. It is also

linked decisively in its articulation in a plaque located in front of the building that simply states,

“Why?” This articulates the essence of Prodanovic’s description of the pervasive sentiment of

victimhood in the city and reaffirms it in the affirmative nature of the memorial.

Another memorial also exists in the park. At the end of a boulevard of pavements separated by a stretch

of gardens, is a stone memorial dedicated to the children who were killed during the NATO bombing

campaign of Belgrade. In the space of the park, NATO is the aggressor, Serbia and its children the

innocent victims. The text of the memorial reads: “We were only children,” both in Serbian and,

tellingly, English — the language of the American and British leaders perceived to be the driving force

behind the NATO campaign.

In the space of the park surrounding the children’s memorial, this narrative of victimhood is combined

with one of defiance. A vast majority of the park’s space is dedicated to children and families, with

several separate playground areas, wide paths to accommodate families and prams, and a public

swimming pool on the northern boundary. On the sunny day I was based there, it was rare to see an

adult without a child in tow. The lack of trees in the middle can be read as openness, of the lack of a

need to hide, while the trees providing shade to the children’s playgrounds are not only practical, but

can be viewed as a symbol of protection, covering the children who play below in rememberance of the

ones who never did.

Generalstab Complex: Yugoslavian National Army Headquarters and Federal Ministry of Defence

Another spontaneous site of memorialisation in Belgrade can be found at the Generalstab complex, the

former headquarters of the Yugoslavian National Army and the Federal Ministry of Defence. It is made

up of two main buildings placed at the intersection of two of the city’s main arteries, the streets of

Kneza Milosa and Nemanjina. The buildings face out toward Milosa, and are bisected spatially by

Nemanjina, which separates the mirror-image, stepped profiles of the Ministry of Defence and the

Army Headquarters.

Tasked with the challenge of creating a unified, central space to house the new, socialist Yugoslavian

state’s military headquarters, architect Nikola Dobrovic designed and built the complex in the 1960s.

As Nikolina Bobic writes in her detailed analysis of the structure, his plans imagined the complex as a

                                                                                                               96 Ibid.

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break in with breaking away from both “conservative Serbo-Byzantine roots”97 as well as the traditional

values of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, formed after WWI.98 Dobrovic drew upon Bergson’s theoretical

ideas of space and memory (explained in the preceding chapter) to articulate through his design

evocations of the burgeoning identity of Serbia’s new socialist state.99 He viewed these ideas not only as

a way to “re-imagine and extend the present” but also as a way to use a new kind of architecture,

infused with this philosophy, as a tool through which society (namely, its identity) could be

transformed.100

What resulted was “an excellent example, probably unique in the world, of French philosopher Henri

Bergson’s esthetic theories of spatial perception into a constructed work of architecture,” according to

Miloš Perović, of the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, and Zoran Žegarac, Deputy

Director of Town Planning at the Institute of Belgrade. 101 In his concept for the headquarters,

Dobvronic drew upon Bergson’s conical conception of memory to communicate his architectural

philosophy, creating a literal cone by using a stepped profile for the profiles of the two structures, the

side of which angles down in a “V” to the space of the road that split the buildings. According to

Bobic’s analysis of the complex, this “void” created by the negative space called to mind a

mythologized tide-changing WWII battle for the Yugoslav Army102 and, by relying on the mythology of

that battle, was perceived as “integral part of a new image and identity for the post-WWII nation, as it

signified space and time being open and multiple, making possible the re-imagination and affirmation

of life beyond the currently known.”103 Dobrovic also used Bergson’s idea of the cone, a symbol of the

overlapping layers of memory that stretch through history, to articulate the multiplicity of memory that

would make up the new, dynamic Yugoslav identity that, contrary to the hopes of project

commissioners seeking a singular narrative of identity rejected this singularity104 and would instead be

defined by the multiple narratives of its various component cultures.105 The very movement of

pedestrians through the void would “become a sequence in the becoming of the contemporary

condition,”106 or the formation of this new identity.

By engineering the collision of matter, space and memory in a representation of Bergson’s philosophy

in his design for the complex, Dobrovic “made it an active part of Belgrade and the new SFRY

identity. It was this insofar as citizens would move through the void in the building complex on an

everyday basis and would thereby be able to acknowledge the event that signified a will to break from

Fascism, but also be open to change and growth as individuals and as a nation.”107, Ultimately, as

Dobrovic intended, the Generalstab “was a key structure in the formation of a new identity of the

                                                                                                               97 Nikolina Bobic, “Belgrade in Formation(s): Dobrovic’s Generalstab Complex,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 21, no. 1 (August 12, 2013): 8, doi:10.1080/10331867.2012.10739933. 98 Ibid., 10. 99 Ibid., 7. 100 Ibid., 12. 101 Miloš R Perović and Zoran Žegarac, “The Destruction of an Architectural Culture: The 1999 Bombing of Belgrade,” Cities 17, no. 6 (December 2000): 396, doi:10.1016/S0264-2751(00)00039-1. 102 Bobic, “Belgrade in Formation(s)," 14. 103 Ibid., 14. 104 Ibid., 15. 105 Ibid., 12. 106 Ibid., 16. 107 Ibid., 14-15.

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Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) after WWII,” communicating a “dynamic

conception of ‘Grand Belgrade’,” the future that could be in store for the new nation.108

But Dobrovic left the project as it was being built, and without his presence, some of the red stone used

in the construction was replaced with white, creating a disjuncture between the two buildings meant to

be symmetrical. Not only was the coherency of the physical structure itself thrown off, but the

asymmetry produced a break in the symbolic articulation of the building, hinting instead at the “lack of

a singular approach in the creation of a new SFRY identity” 109 and foretelling the more bellicose

conflicts of identity that would manifest before the 1999 NATO bombing that would destroy the

structure.

During the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, the complex was likely the place from which directives were

issued, including the urbicide of Vukovar, destruction of Dubrovnic and siege of Sarajevo, leading

NATO to mark it as a target for its bombing campaign. Beginning on 24 March 1999, the bombings

continued for a month before the complex was ruined. Significantly, the void, once an articulation of

identity and its dynamic construction, was the area “most altered” as a result.110 Today, the ruin is left

standing, half of the exterior of one of the buildings blown off; on the other half of the complex, a

structure stands whose original purpose is unfathomable to the uninformed passerby. It looks much like

a hollowed concrete box on stilts, and you can see through that ruin to a chasm in the more solid

building behind it.

Today, there exists no clear plan in the city to deal with the site. It has been left in its ruined state, and

if that continues, the great triumph of architecture will incrementally slip into ruin time, becoming

Classic. But it is not yet distanced enough temporally to demonstrate this transition: The debate

surrounding the structure suggests that the structure is still very much present in the social discource

and ordering of the city.

But while it is a functionally useless structure, like Barthes’ Eiffel Tower, it has meaning put onto it, re-

defining its primary function as that of a symbol, a signifier of what it means. The Generalstab is

victimisation.

Jewish Museum, Berlin After the reunification of Berlin, the process of memorialization has involved a direct and aggressive

effort at addressing its past, unlike in the sites explored in Belgrade: There is an acknowledgement that

can be read in the memorialization of the atrocity that the nation committed, such as in the memorials

to the murdered Gypsies, Roma, Jews and homosexuals located around Tiergarten Park. As memorials

can be read as part of the text of an identity, as a sign of how the past is viewed in light of how the city

                                                                                                               108 Ibid., 7. 109 Ibid., 19. 110 Ibid., 22.

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views itself now, Berlin articulates through these deliberate constructions an effort at taking ownership

for the trauma it wrought. However, A particularly pertinent example of the intersection of architecture

and memory in an effort to deal with trauma can be found in the case of the Judische Museum in

Berlin, a structure that plays “a significant role in housing collective memory” as the “self-conscious

offspring” of the opposition of history and memory located at its crossroads.111

Post-WWII, Berlin was not yet ready to deal with its role in the Holocaust, nor was there much of an

interest in it: “In the 1950s, there was no public interest in the history of the Nazi period, nor was t here

interest in dealing with the history of Jews in Germany.” The city was still in a traumatised state,

repressing recent memory as an instinctive defence against a horrible past they were not yet capable of

confronting.112 It was not until 1988, the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, that a public discourse about

Berlin’s role in the Holocaust began again, resulting in the appearance of more than 400 books on local

Jewish history across the disjointed country. However, these books were criticized for their unconscious

emphasis on local patriotism, a flaw that articulated itself within these chronicles that antagonists of the

Holocaust always came from outside the local population,113 that it was always someone else’s

aggression. While Berlin might have been ready to discuss the trauma it had enabled, it was not yet

ready to take ownership of it.

In 1989, the director of the Berlin Museum and the director of the Jewish Department of the Berlin

Museum, the two authors of the conceptual brief, explicitly directed that the museum should reflect the

religion, history and selected biographies of Jewish people in Germany. Libeskind responded to the

briefing with a proposal that answered the guidelines while also providing an avenue through which to

directly confront the past. This avenue took the form of three messages to be conveyed by the

architectural design of the museum: First, that it was impossible to understand the history of Berlin

without understanding the contributions and role of the Jewish community; 2) that there was a need to

‘integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory

for the city;” and, importantly for this paper, 3) it was the “acknowledgement and incorporation of this

erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin” that would allow Berlin to humanise its future. 114In the space

driven by these points, Libeskind, dealt extensively with the idea of post-traumatic gaps, both in the

“ancient denial of the existence of the void, and the contemporary insistence on invoking the void as

the very idea of the city of Berlin.”115 Libeskind won the bid for the design the same year. completed it

in 1999 and opened it to the public in 2001. His Jewish Museum “explicitly presents and integrates, for

the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions of the Holocaust,” according to Libeskind’s

portfolio website. It was also the first deliberate attempt to ‘own’ the past, in the sense that the wrongs

done unto the Jewish people of Berlin by the Nazi state would be acknowledged and dealt with within

the space of the museum.

                                                                                                               111 Edge and Weiner, “Collective Memory and the Museum,” 226 112  Robin  Ostow,  (Re)visualizing  National  History:  Museums  and  National  Identities  in  Europe  in  the  New  Millennium  (University  of  Toronto  Press,  2008),  139.  113  Ibid.,  141.  114  Edge  and  Weiner,  “Collective  Memory  and  the  Museum,”  235.  115  Ibid.  

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One year later, Libeskind’s design for the Jewish Museum Berlin was conceptualised, presented as a

direct means of confronting Berlin’s violent role in the Holocaust and coming to terms with it in a way

that a humanized future for the city would be not only viable, but accepted.116 The role of the museum

was to articulate this past in such a way that the memories constructing this narrative of the city’s

identity could be articulated and housed in this museum, effectively transporting the burden of the

remembered past into a space where it could be productively articulated and effectively communicated

through a bespoke form.

Libeskind communicated articulations of Jewish identity within the overall concept of his work,

primarily by configuring the spatial structure of the museum around a distorted Star of David,117

representing the various identities and nationalities of the Jewish people in Berlin, as well as the ways in

which the people had been torn asunder and apart, presumably because of actions stemming from

Berlin. The layout of the interior of the museum revolves around a system of hallways leading, in

various configurations, to more rooms, the upper levels of the exhibit, or, significantly, the Holocaust

Void, a great black shell of a tower in which no light can be perceived and no sound but for the

ambient noise of the city outside. In a deliberate effort to engender direct confrontation and

acknowledgement with the past, the void represents the absence created by the Holocaust in the

cultural fabric of the city.

While the narrative of the RTS building is one of wrenching victimisation, the children’s memorial and

surrounding space of the park reads as a memorial of victimisation and also a defiant approach to the

future. However, it seems incomplete: Unlike in Berlin, where Holocaust memorialisation is articulated

and understood as not only commemoration for its citizens but for those it also did wrong to, Belgrade

refuses to take like responsibility for their actions. There is no mention of children killed in the genocide

that stemmed from Belgrade. Children are undoubtedly innocent victims of war: To have dedicated the

space to the children of the Balkans who died during the conflict would have implied an

acknowledgement of the past, an act of addressing it. Yet by positioning the memorial in a way that

places Belgrade’s children at the unforgiving mercy of NATO bombs, the overwhelming narrative of

the space is one of personal victimhood.

                                                                                                               116  Ibid.,  235.  117  Ibid.,  236.  

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3. The Regress to the absence Belgrade’s Contemporary Art Museum In the two years that have passed since my first visit in March 2011, the city’s landscape has changed as

renovations slowly begin. It is no longer punctuated with as many voids or gaps in the city text, but

budget cuts, as a result of the financial crisis, ensure the city remains markedly dilapidated, with

crumbling facades on many of its buildings. One such building that has borne the brunt of these cuts is

the city’s Contemporary Art Museum.

One of Europe’s first contemporary art museums, Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in

Novi Sad (New Belgrade) in 1965 after four years of construction.118 Though the museum’s collection

contains many recognizable names — Warhol and Miró, among others — the dominant presence of

artists from Serbia, as well from as across the former Yugoslavia, imbued the museum with a sense of

identity and contribute to the museum’s role in collective cultural memory.

The museum was damaged on 28 April from the shelling of the nearby USCE business tower. The

glazing of the museum was destroyed, and works inside the museum suffered from damage. Statues

exposed in the museum’s garden also experienced considerable damage. Though used for exhibitions

in a haphazard condition for almost a decade, it wasn’t until 2008 that renovations were finally

undertaken to restore the museum to its original potential, but they were halted in 2010 — with the

financial crisis in full swing, there simply wasn’t the $8 million needed to finish the project. 119

Five years later, little, if any work has been done, and the museum is still closed, in a state of

suspension. When I visited the museum during my June 2013 fieldwork, not realizing it was still closed

(there was no indication given on its now-defunct website), the landscape that I encountered

surrounding the museum struck me as dystopic. The statue garden was overgrown, and several statues,

pointlessly exposed for too long to the erosive effects of weather, had fallen over or were crumbling.

The effect was a distinct one of the uncanny, amplified by a small pink poster hanging in one of the

building’s dirty windows near the door: a flyer advertising “Design Week Belgrade 2013.”

I walked up the entrance ramp and opened the door to a man stationed at the entrance, presumably to

explain the situation to unwitting would-be visitors. I explained the purpose of my visit to him and

asked how long the museum would be closed for renovations. He looked around at the empty lobby

and sighed: “At least six years,” he said. One of the city’s most popular tourism websites declares

                                                                                                               118 Ginanne Brownell, “Belgrade’s Art Scene, Waiting for Its Moment,” New York Times, June 29, 2012, sec. Art, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/arts/30iht-scbelgrade30.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 119 Ibid.

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simply, “indefinitely.” The museum’s chief curator tells the New York Times that, “unfortunately, he

doesn’t know.”120

Later, I did a general Google search for the museum to educate myself on the discourse surrounding

the structure. On the first page of Google results were websites titled “What happened to the Museum

of Contemporary Art in Belgrade?” “Discarded, Neglected & Forgotten — Why Visit Belgrade’s

Museum of Contemporary Art,” and, from the Times, “Belgrade’s Art Scene, Waiting for Its Moment.”

According to this article, the curator, out of frustration over his museum’s indefinite future, launched

an exhibition hosted in the partially-refurbished gallery space entitled “What Happened to the

Museum of Contemporary Art?” that ran for six months in 2012 and used the building itself as a work,

testifying to its own intermediacy.121

Neither truly closed nor fully open (small exhibitions are sometimes held at one of the museum’s

satellite ‘salons’ throughout the city), the museum proper remains an absence in the city’s cultural and

spatial text.. Current renovations are being carried out within the space of the original building,

modifying what is left of the space after its destruction. Especially in post-Communist cities, writes

Pusca, this method of renovation serves “to recreate the illusion of a particular space and interaction

that is now missed: either by preserving actual parts of the former space, by recreating similar spaces, or

by symbolically enacting a particular memory. They are key to proving not only an important sense of

belonging to a community but also of self-worth.”122

Suspended in a liminal state and berefit of its utilitas, Belgrade’s museum has ceased to form a

meaningful part of the urban text: It hovers in liminality, the works it contains representing the collision

of time, the amalgamation of past and present that characterises the temporal nature of the liminal

structure. Left in this state, the museum will eventually decay past the point of repair to become an

eerie Classical ruin on the banks of the Sava.

   

                                                                                                               120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Pusca, “Industrial and Human Ruins of Postcommunist Europe.” 241

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Conclusion Both Belgrade and Berlin share strong similarities covered in the scope of this paper: Each city played a

role of aggressor in campaigns of genocide and war and experienced retaliatory trauma at the hand of

what is considered the ‘West’ as a result of their aggression. Each city also dealt with being caught

between West and East: Berlin was quite literally split in two by this dichotomy of identities and

struggled with their reconciliation after unification. For Belgrade, the struggle has been centuries longer

but has resulted in the city’s marginalization and liminal place between West and East, contested today

by an articulated desire for Europeanisation and burgeoning political push to join the European Union.

However, the ways in which Berlin dealt with these issues, articulating them in the spatial order of the

city, are ultimately ways of ‘owning’ their traumatic past and presenting new, constructed narratives of

identity that spell out a way for the city to move forward, as demonstrated in the spatial practice of

these spaces.

For Belgrade, the identity of the city currently articulated through its post-conflict structures is

comprised of multiple and contradictory narratives, those of victimization, a desire for Europeanisation,

and stagnation where significant voids still remain in the cityscape. Unlike Berlin, whose reconstructive

efforts after reunification as a democratic capital largely articulated a desire to acknowledge its recent

past of genocide and recover from a largely frozen state divided between East and West, Belgrade has

yet to acknowledge its past. a struggle between victimhood that self-fulfill’s the region’s ever-present

contention with marginalistation, therefore continuing its autonomous state, and one of a European or

pro-European identity. “This suggests what Mocnik has argued is at the “traumatic” core of Balkanist

discourse: that the location of the border of the nation, and implicitly autonomy, is dependent “upon

recognition of the other”123. This struggle of identity is visibly articulated and easily read in the city’s

text, as articulated by its architecture: “We can see the tension here between autonomy and belonging

to Europe...” writes Lavrence.124

In the reconstruction of the voids, there is potential for Serbia to attempt to articulate an identity that is

more European than Serbian. Already in the city’s downtown core, a European identity is “linked

(symbolically and architecturally) with proximity to Europe”125. This could continue to be the case with

the voids that are being re-assigned meaning through the processes of reinvention and rebuilding

informed by a collective memory. As stated before, the inherent freedom of collective memory’s

multiple perspectives to articulate and challenge a construct of identity (as compared to the restrictive

nature of the historical discourse) provides a vehicle for acknowledgement of trauma that is possibly

avoided or ignored in the dominant historical narrative, especially when the architect of such a space is

from outside the general cultural context upon which this dominant narrative is imposed.

                                                                                                               123 R. Mocnik, “The Balkans As an Element in Ideological Mechanisms,” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 93. 124 Lavrence, “The Serbian Bastille: Memory, Agency, and Monumental Public Space in Belgrade.” 125 Ibid. 36

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But the identity that is largely being articulated by the other voids in the city, those left standing, scars

in the open, is largely one of victimisation, the dominant historical narrative both imposed and

reinforced upon Belgrade. The duality comprised of both a European projection and a uniquely

Serbian articulation of victimisation indicates that the city continues to struggle with the simultaneous

articulation of two opposing identities. In leaving the scars of the damage inflicted upon them in the

open, in a defiant display of victimisation, it is clear that Serbians continue to view themselves as the

“Other,” not only in the NATO conflict, but also in the Us-Other/European-Balkans struggle of

identity. As long as this marginalised identity continues to be articulated, Belgrade locks itself in the

position of the Other. As the capital city is representative of the nation as a whole, the projection of

identity articulated by the capital city is, at a macro level, an articulation of the identity of the nation

itself, and it is likely the identity recognised by European nations in their consideration of Belgrade.

 

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