,
49 tweets,
15 min read
Read on Twitter
THE TALE OF TJENTISTE: Antifascism, Artistic Brutalism, and the Death of a Modernist Future 
(This is an old deleted thread I am reposting after several DM requests)
It was called “Case Black,” and it must have felt apocalyptic.
Imagine you’re at your post, half-asleep on a hot summer morning somewhere along the Sutjeska River in 1943. Somewhere like this.
A pre-teen boy comes running through the woods towards your camp, shouting the safety pass-phrase. You know this boy.
He is Serbian, but dressed in the Austrian style, a trick to fool Italian soldiers who were using displaced Austrians as guides and domestic servants.
The young scout’s disguise won’t fool the inquisitive, because although the boy speaks 3 tongues, none of them are Italian or German.
You ask what’s wrong. He says they are back. The ones in the green coats like last summer. And the tanks with the black cross.
You ask, “How many did you see?”
“More than many,” he replies, brow furrowing.
Your voice hardens. “How many, a hundred? A thousand?”
He shakes his head. “There is no number for what I saw.”
“More than many,” he replies, brow furrowing.
Your voice hardens. “How many, a hundred? A thousand?”
He shakes his head. “There is no number for what I saw.”
It was May 1943. For two years, a rag-tag group of Yugoslav partisans had harassed the new pro-Axis puppet regime.
Here is partisan hero Stjepan Filipović shouting "Death to fascism, freedom to the people!" seconds before his execution.
These communist guerillas, led by the enigmatic “Tito,” were ethnically mixed and gender equal.
Indeed, women were the backbone and soul of the resistance.
Now, after two years of sporadic guerilla engagements with mostly Italian auxiliaries, the Germans had finally come in force.
Anticipating an Allied invasion of the Balkans, Hitler diverted resources to wiping out this pesky antifascist insurgent band.
After a month of bloody engagements, the Germans failed. But it came at enormous cost to the partisans. In the battle at Tjentiste, just 20k partisans broke through ten German divisions, but 2/3 of their own force was killed or wounded.
But the victory made it clear that the partisans were a viable fighting force, and that Josep Broz Tito was a viable leader.
After the war, Tito embarked a plan to modernize and unite Yugoslavians in utopian communist solidarity.
As he recognized, his plan to help Yugoslavia forge a united culture faced unique challenges.
Tito commissioned more than 100 monuments, called spomeniks, for the victims of fascism, including the fractured wings at Tjentiste.
These monuments are arguably the purest expressions of modernist art ever produced.
They are each, without exception, instantly arresting and deeply compelling objects.
They purposefully lack any cultural references, as explained by failedarchitecture.com/mortal-cities-…
This one is called “Interrupted flight.” It is a memorial for Serbian, Jewish and Roma men and boys massacred in 1941.
This one is “The Sniper’s Mausoleum,” celebrating slain partisan heroes.
This one is called “Courage,” a brutalist monument to the fallen partisans of the nearby town of Čačak.
Here is a monument in Podgora to celebrate the creation of an anti-fascist naval force. It’s called Seagull’s Wing.
This is the Memorial Tomb for the Fallen Soldiers from Golubovci.
But the most magnificent is Tjentiste. Here is a link to a Google 360 view: bit.ly/2xqcE3C. You really have to take it in.
There are a lot of bad things to be said about Tito – just as there are bad things to be said about pretty much all the major world leaders of the 20th century – but by and large Yugoslavia prospered under his futuristic technocratic egalitarian experiment.
Like most leaders who arose during WWII, Tito emerged from the war with a lot of innocent blood on his hands. But over the years, Tito transformed himself and his nation. Though he was a dictator, he arguably became a benevolent dictator.
Though communist, Tito was anti-Stalinist. He created the Non-Aligned Movement with Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasser of Egypt, and Nkrumah of Ghana. This is was the first unified pushback on global imperialism against the Eastern and Western blocs.
The NAM countries, eventually over 150, refused to take sides in the Cold War. They forged a third way, declining to be pawns.
The NAM pledged to “struggle against imperialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination.”
Yugoslavia was a beacon of the Third World from 1960 until 1980, when Tito died. Things went downhill shortly after that.
Yugoslavia’s foreign policy depended on playing a fulcrum between the superpowers, and that was doomed when one of those powers collapsed. In the 80s, when the West was ostensibly promoting glasnost in the Eastern bloc, their economic policy was choking Yugoslavia.
Even before the Soviet Union fell, Western powers were already carving up the spoils. Coercive debt relief packages, frozen sources of foreign investment, and punitive trade measures by US and EU countries led to run away debt and inflation.
Lacking prosperity and unified leadership for years, the ethnic divisions of the past began to re-emerge. In 1991, the country fell apart in a horrific ethnic civil war.
The region never fully recovered. Today, most spomeniks are abandoned and many are in states of ruin.
Their state of neglect is as expressive as their creation.
They have transformed into monuments to a failed dream. A dream of fully automated luxury space communism, 300 years too early.
Maybe the lesson is that you can’t blithely erase the challenges of pluralism and identity with a new blank slate utopian culture.
Modernism hoped to throw off the cultural baggage of the past, replacing it with a new shared bond of socially conditioned values. But when things got desperate in Yugoslavia, those old touchstones quickly returned.
Critics of modernism scorned its optimism about human nature and social progress, and they ultimately began to reject the assumptions of Enlightenment rationality.
And that led us to post-modernism, as we rebelled so hard against structured narratives that we abandoned universalist notions of reality or truth. Stuck in the nihilism of pop, we endlessly deconstructed and re-purposed our own cultural fragments to confound meanings.
And where did that get us? Well…you know where.
Sorry to end on such a depressing note.
Anyway, there’s lots of good websites to learn about the spomeniks, but the best by far is SpomenikDatabase.org
And @SpomenikDatabse recently published a very nice hardcover book compiling his research and photos, which I highly recommend.
