The Secrets of Titograd in 1989: On Entanglements and Fragile Networks between the Intellectuals of West Germany and Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

A contradiction stands at the beginning of this paper: On the one hand Yugoslavia seemed to be different in comparison to other state-socialist countries, offering particularly in the intellectual/scientific sphere possibilities for a gradually autonomous networking of scholars and intellectuals with Western colleagues. But, although these possibilities were used, that a part of the intellectual scene in Serbia oriented towards nationalism increasingly abandoned those connections at the beginning of the 1990s. This paper will analyze possible answers to two question about how the contacts and entanglements among intellectuals and scholars in the former decades were maintained and why they in a particular intellectual current lost their former importance. An overview of the journal Praxis and the Praxis summer school, as well as the contacts of Serbian Historians to German scholars will be conceptualized as a history of the transfer of ideas and as a history of the relations between West and East. In order to avoid an essentialist understanding of transfers between “different cultures,” I will center on notions and concepts that are objects of transfers and appropriations. Thereby it is important to stress that adjustments and modifications in particular contexts are an integral part of analyzing the transfers of ideas. Another possibility for avoiding an essentialist view of “national cultures” and “mentalities” is to follow the development and the meaning of institutions within a scientific praxis as well as the limits and possibilities of autonomous research in socialist Yugoslavia.