Metropolitan Belgrade

Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia

Jovana Babovic,Jovana Babovi?,Jovana Babovi?,Jovana Babovi?,Jovana Babovi?

• Éditeur: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780822983392
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Eastern European History

Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society. As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade's middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital's middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.

1

ENTERTAINMENT AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

After she lost her job as an entertainer at the Belgrade restaurant Krokodil in 1936, Tatjana Gez wrote to the Association of Actors to ask for help wrangling the remainder of her unpaid salary. The proprietor had unjustly fired her, Gez explained, because she had refused to wait on tables once she had finished with her duties on stage. This was a breach of her contract as well as the state statute that prohibited female employees from simultaneously working as entertainers and servers. As a trained stage actress, Gez was astutely aware that she was vulnerable to loss of her “highbrow” status if the association, a professional middle-class organization for trained Yugoslav performers, deemed that she had slipped into “lowbrow” work. She was also aware that educated middle-class Belgraders, like those who led the association, held the reins of a bourgeois cultural hierarchy that subordinated entertainment to the arts and folk culture. In her appeal to the Association of Actors, Gez denounced Krokodil as an “illegitimate” stage and insisted that she had taken the position out of necessity when she was laid off from her post at the elite National Theater.¹ Although the final resolution of her case is unclear, the president of the association forwarded Gez’s request to the minister of education with the recommendation that she be reimbursed for the amount of her withheld salary. On the surface, at least, it seemed that both men had sympathized with Gez and that they hoped to rectify her situation. But in an accompanying letter that the president of the Association of Actors sent to the minister of education, there was no mention of Tatjana Gez, the high rates of unemployment among professional performers, or the rampant disregard for labor laws among venue proprietors. Instead, the president used Gez’s complaint as fodder for expressing his concern about the blurred boundary between highbrow culture and entertainment.² He was displeased that Krokodil advertised as a “cheerful theater” (veselo pozorište) because he believed that the term “theater” only merited use by “serious” cultural institutions. The president of the association found the restaurant’s use of the word particularly unsettling because its owner Petar Stajić was an entertainer and its clientele was working-class. It was not uncommon for venues in prewar and interwar Belgrade to use similar language to describe performances that featured short skits, saucy dancing, and political satire. But, unlike Krokodil, most of the venues that did so without attracting the state’s attention hosted foreign entertainment onstage and middle-class residents in the audience. That is to say that educated Belgraders did not perceive all entertainment to be equal. By the 1930s foreign entertainment had become an acceptable leisured diversion for respectable residents and a constituent of the bourgeois cultural hierarchy. Domestic entertainment and working-class culture, in contrast, had not. When the president of the Association of Actors voiced worry that Krokodil’s promotion as a “cheerful theater” was a misleading use of the word “theater,” he was not so much opposing all entertainment as he was vilifying its local iterations.

Entertainment from abroad grew in popularity in Belgrade over the course of the interwar years, particularly among the city’s middle-class residents. After the Great War new networks and technologies made leisure more numerous, more diverse, and more transnational in form and content. Educated middle-class Belgraders were initially concerned that foreign entertainment undermined the salience of the arts and folk culture and, with it, their legitimacy to define cultural parameters in Yugoslav society. In the 1920s they labored to rhetorically delineate entertainment from “respectable” culture. Business-minded middle-class proprietors of clubs, amateur producers of radio, and popular press publishers argued for a different cultural definition. Driven by the potential for profit, they carved out a place for foreign entertainment by promoting it with the language of highbrow culture and disassociating it from domestic entertainment like Petar Stajić’s Krokodil. They presented the former as uniquely urban, distinctly refined, and positively European while they pigeonholed the latter as a form of “lesser” culture. As a middle-class society centralized in the capital over the course of the interwar years, its consumption of foreign entertainment, much like its rejection of Yugoslav iterations, cemented its participation in European metropolitan modernity.

ENTERTAINMENT BEFORE AND AFTER THE GREAT WAR

Belgrade transformed after the Great War, and so did its urban culture. As the capital of the Kingdom of Serbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Belgrade was home to a vibrant entertainment scene—from the café-bar stages in the bohemian quarter Skadarlija to the one-man traveling troupe Branov Orfeum—that was primarily staffed by local performers. Once the city stood at the head of a unified Yugoslavia, it came in contact with a wealth of culture from beyond the state’s borders. New networks and technologies facilitated the transnational movement of people, goods, and information. Residents’ outward gaze, moreover, made arriving leisure trends like film, jazz, and cabaret alluring cultural artifacts. In the 1920s and 1930s Belgrade hosted entertainment that was far more diverse and far more foreign than it had been during the prewar years. However, as leisure from abroad came to preoccupy the attention of urban residents, there was less and less room for Yugoslav performers.

In the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Belgrade evolved from a provincial city to the capital of the Kingdom of Serbia. Like leaders of other newly independent East European states, Serbia’s small middle class invested in building Belgrade into a national capital.³ For example, the state funded the construction of the National Theater, and it supported the establishment of publishing presses, academies, and museums. When it came to entertainment, prewar Belgrade resonated with national rather than transnational urban culture. The café-pub (kafana) was the premier site of urban entertainment. Café-pubs were found across the city, but they clustered in Belgrade’s bohemian quarter Skadarlija. An overwhelmingly male clientele visited the neighborhood to eat, drink, and fraternize but also to enjoy folk singers, orchestras, and comedians. When traveling troupes, touring panoramas, and rudimentary film screenings came to Belgrade, they frequently performed in Skadarlija’s café-pubs. The historian Dubravka Stojanović suggests that these establishments served a central role in the social life of nineteenth-century Belgrade, much as Viennese and Parisian coffeehouses did around the same time. Moreover, Stojanović considers café-pubs as the city’s first democratic spaces.⁴ But although they facilitated new cultural encounters, the leisure offered therein was primarily created by and for middle-class Serbian men. For instance, Branislav “Brana” Cvetković (1874–1942)—the writer, producer, and actor behind the popular Branov Orfeum—staged his shows on a rotating cast of Belgrade’s makeshift café-pub stages.⁵ Similar to other popular prewar writers such as Branislav Nušić (1864–1938) and Čiča Ilija Stanojević (1859–1930), he drew inspiration from experiences of the city that were shaped by his class, gender, and ethno-national identity. While Cvetković’s work held up a familiar mirror to typical patrons of the nineteenth-century café-pub, it failed to offer a compelling or accurate narrative to the new generation of urban patrons that included self-actualizing middle-class residents, women, and a diversifying ethnic tapestry of twentieth-century Yugoslav citizens. As one journalist suggested in 1928, Cvetković’s skits had become an “old-fashioned” representation of the city life that no longer reflected the contemporary world.⁶ Moreover, compared to transnational entertainment, Branov Orfeum attracted less attention from interwar urban residents. Skadarlija faced a similar fate after the Great War. Yugoslav writers, actors, and politicians continued to gather in the neighborhood,⁷ but new cinemas and variety theaters displaced the neighborhood’s famed café-pubs as the center of Belgrade’s urban life.

New networks and technologies fundamentally reshaped urban leisure in the interwar years. Once it stood as the capital of unified Yugoslavia after the First World War, Belgrade developed a direct connection to other big European cities like Paris, London, and Berlin. It became a more important link on physical networks of movement like roads, rail, and water transport routes, and as it grew, international corporations increasingly saw it as a profitable market. Not only that, but technologies such as electricity, radio waves, and telephones enabled the quicker dissemination of information across further distances. In Belgrade, as elsewhere, these new connections and technologies ushered in new types of leisure.

Relative to the prewar period, there was simply more entertainment in interwar Belgrade. By the mid-1920s ten cinemas replaced cramped, makeshift viewing rooms in café-bars and accommodated upwards of one thousand patrons for each film screening.⁸ By the early 1930s most of these venues had the capacity to show talkies and they brought more than seven hundred unique films to Yugoslavia annually.⁹ Aside from a handful of notable domestic features and short public service clips, most of the films screened during the interwar years were foreign romances, comedies, and westerns. As the city’s population doubled by the end of the 1920s and then tripled by the end of the 1930s, there were also more printed publications to meet the rising literacy rates as well as readers’ demands and broadening interests. Some turn-of-the-century newspapers like the dailies Politika and Pravda (Justice) continued to thrive in Belgrade. Politika was Belgrade’s most-read paper during the interwar years; it had an average circulation of 45,000–80,000 in 1929, or a readership of about one in every four Belgraders. New publications, however, rivaled it. Newspapers like Vreme (Time) had a circulation of 30,000–45,000 and Reč (Word) had 9,000–12,000 regular readers. Like cinemas, the popular press was indebted to technological advancements and transnational networks. Telegraphs and telephones allowed publications to print up-to-date information from around the world and the popularization of photography enabled them to visually engage the public. Illustrated magazines were a benchmark of interwar publishing. They, too, had a robust readership: the boulevard press Ilustrovani list (Illustrated Paper) had a circulation of 18,000, the women’s magazine Žena i svet (Woman and the World) reached 5,000 readers, and the performing arts publication Comœdia (Comedy) had an audience of 2,500.¹⁰ Illustrated magazines offered news snippets, features, and random tidbits that mirrored the dizzying fragmentation of everyday urban life. In Belgrade they competed with an ever-growing selection of publications imported from abroad.

Films and periodicals became products of mass consumption in interwar Belgrade, but they were not novel to urban residents. Cabarets, radio, and jazz, by comparison, were entirely new forms of entertainment. There were several venues that advertised cabaret or, alternatively, variety theater performances in interwar Belgrade: Vračar, Ruski car (Russian Czar), Palas Theater, Kasina Theater, Ritz Bar, and Luksor (Luxor) Theater. They typically hosted a revolving door of foreign entertainers who performed short singing, dancing, and acrobatic skits. After its launch in 1929 the station Radio Belgrade occasionally broadcast hour-long “cabaret evenings” that played recorded renditions of popular on-stage songs. Although radio listeners could not see the performers in the flesh or experience the atmosphere of the electrified venues, they engaged with another technological innovation of entertainment: the airwaves. The very notion of listening to operas, folk orchestras, and cabaret on personal receivers made urban spaces of leisure uniquely accessible in the privacy of the home. Syndicated programs from cities like Vienna, Prague, and London similarly enabled local listeners to hear foreign culture without leaving their homes. Jazz was perhaps the most controversial of the new genres of interwar entertainment because it ushered in a dance craze that challenged the ordered melodies of prewar Waltzes and Cardinals. Belgrade jazz clubs like the Mascotte hosted live performances by touring musicians and local groups like the Džoli-bojz (Jolly Boys), Miki džez (Mickey Jazz), and the Melody Boys, while Radio Belgrade regularly broadcast live and recorded jazz music.¹¹

What made these new types of entertainment distinct in interwar Belgrade, as in most other European cities around the same time, was that they were more likely to be transnational than national. In Paris, for instance, the popularity of American jazz outpaced that of the French chanson. It ushered in, as the historian Jeffery Jackson argues, “an era when old national boundaries and artistic categories were far more porous than before.”¹² Berlin’s entertainment underwent a similar transformation from a prewar cabaret scene steeped in localness to an interwar revue imported from Paris, London, and New York. The historian Peter Jelavich suggests that Berlin’s interwar cabarets “demonstrated their cosmopolitan allure not by touting Berlin, but rather by presenting an array of foreign numbers.”¹³ In Belgrade, too, entertainment from abroad became a benchmark of urban life during the interwar years.

Interwar popular press publishers and venue proprietors saw a potential for profit in the cosmopolitan allure of foreign forms of entertainment, and they became among the first to embrace it. As business-savvy middle-class urbanites, publishers were invested in securing a permanent place for their magazines and newspapers in the city. They did this by promoting European metropolitan trends that appealed to—and shaped—Belgraders’ evolving sense of self as urbanites and Europeans rather than as Yugoslavs or Serbs. For instance, Comœdia championed French, British, and German models of the popular stage. When actors of the National Theater were on summer break in 1924, the magazine excitedly reported that they staged soirées libres similar to those performed in Parisian boulevard theaters. These French-style performances, Comœdia claimed, were an integral component of metropolitan culture that had a place in the Yugoslav capital. “The Belgrade audience is a big city audience, and as such it has a distinct mentality and particular desires,” the author explained. “It needs more than just what appears on the stage of the National Theater.”¹⁴ By comparing Belgraders to big-city urbanites, the magazine suggested that their cultural diet ought to be supplemented by foreign-inspired leisure like boulevard theaters. Moreover, making room for soirées libres was a strategy Comœdia’s publisher used to position the magazine as an arbiter of urban entertainment. Other illustrated magazines were similarly invested in promoting leisure from abroad in Belgrade; they printed stories about fun in foreign cities, they advertised local clubs that hosted touring performers, and they informed readers about the latest dance trends. When popular press publishers embraced foreign styles of entertainment, they offered their audience what the historian Nathaniel Wood terms a “common ground” for relating to their contemporaries in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin.¹⁵ All the while, they established their authority over the transnational dialogue they imparted.

Like publishers who attracted readers with coverage of foreign popular culture, proprietors of Belgrade’s newly opened cabarets, variety theaters, and jazz clubs eagerly billed foreign performers for their programs and used the foreignness of their content to carve out a niche for their venues in the city. Foreign starlets distinguished the interwar club from the prewar café-pub’s folk orchestras and Roma singers. For instance, a program at the Kasina Theater from 1925 advertised a variety repertoire that included the “international dancers” Diosy Margit, Mimi Hodbod, Aurelia Dor, Terry Rosko, Kazinsky Agota, Miklos Kato, Lidia Gorlinska; the ballerinas Claire Claremont and Charlotte Klein; and the singing troupe Schimay Harmoni Four.¹⁶ A couple of years later, a playbill from the Palas Theater featured an equally worldly cast: Dori Adorjan danced the Charleston while the Golden Dancers parodied it, Ninon de Freur staged a Romanian dance, and Dodo and Grete presented English and Hungarian skits.¹⁷ Most of these entertainers performed under stage names, sometimes more than one, so it is nearly impossible to match them to the registration cards archived at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The cultural critic Boško Tokin (1894–1953) joked that they were “Hungarians, Germans, and Czechs [who] danced under Spanish, French, and English stage names.”¹⁸ But Tokin was not too far from the truth when he implied that the intentionally scrambled identities of foreign entertainers were, in themselves, the main act on the interwar stage. A Hungarian singer who billed herself as Miss Arizona embodied a pertinent example of this trend as well as an ironic one given the context of Yugoslavia’s concurrent efforts at nationalization. When she visited in the mid-1920s, Miss Arizona was best known for her interpretation of the Sevillian-cum-Parisian José Padila’s song “La Violettera.” An article in Comœdia suggested that her famed rendition was “the most modern and most popular song in the world . . . it’s sung on all continents and in all the large European centers.”¹⁹ Miss Arizona’s musical tal...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Entertainment and the Politics of Culture
• 2. Radio Belgrade and the Modern Urban Listener
• 3. Yugoslav Performers and Working-Class Entertainment
• 4. Belgrade’s Downtown Leisure District
• 5. Accommodating Josephine Baker in Belgrade
• 6. The Strongman Dragoljub Aleksić and the Occupied City
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index