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Oh, Tito, why hast thou forsaken us?
Tina recently caught this gem on the finest radio station in America: “Yugonostalgia Takes Hold in Slovenia“. Reporter Amy Standen does an absolutely bang-up job, bravely fighting through some difficult pronunciations, and even does so from within Slovenia. (Considering how few foreign reporters there are here, I can’t emphasize how unusual that is.)
Yugonostalgia itself is a peculiar thing, in that people will speak bitterly of the political situation in one breath, but praise the slower more relaxed pace of life in another. I’ve also found that, amazingly, many of the people who benefited the most from the switch to a market economy (managers or the nouveau riche) will speak quite fondly of the “old days.”
The story is here (just click on the red “listen” icon)
(Thanks Tina!)
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I do not wonder that Amy is “bravely fighting through some difficult pronunciations”, but AD married for some years to a US woman has even some more problems.
Another group who are quite fond of the “old days” are the teenagers… Which makes no sense whatsoever to me since they were mostly born in the final days of the good old YU.
It does make sense. Feelings and images from the old days are passed to young by their parents. They may be idealized but those are the real feelings. Anyway, what is interesting that yugonostalgia is now present in all former Yugoslav republics, although the feeling was long suppressed by nationalism and is only now manifesting itself in some places. What I also find interesting is that Slovene “intellectualsâ€? such as Debeljak cannot really explain the phenomenon. I would dare say that they don’t want to explain it as they were in the forefront of changes which led to this, as many would say, s***, just so they could write mediocre books (at best).
Ever since Natascha Kampusch escaped and the media talked so much about the Stockholm syndrome I tend to find examples of it almost everywhere. Really, I cannot imagine any other reason for being “emotionally loyal” to something most of us somehow did want to escape from/do away with etc. at the same time.
Alcessa: Would not agree with you. “Most of us” is quite inaccurate. True, most Slovens voted for independence but only after there was no other way out. In the first half of the 80’s the surveys showed extremely high pro-Yugoslav feelings among Slovenians. Just shows how complex political issues were and are. But the bottom line is: Life in Yugoslavia was not bad.
Odisej: I do agree with you about life in Yugoslavia not being really bad. For example, I know people from East Germany and so I have to agree, the difference is amazing.
But: I was terribly bored in YU - the dictatorship of the proletariat was all too omnipresent in the province I spent my youth in.
@alcessa: But the Stockholm syndrome of the East Germans is the same. Apparently it is common for people to want to have bad stuff back as soon as it is gone. Read s.th. about it once about dictatorships in South America.
Novala: mhm, I got to know some really “blatant examples” of Ostalgia, too. My standard reaction is to think I’d have gotten shot during an escape if I’d had had to live in E. Germany - but who knows, perhaps I wouldn’t have been such a hero at all. Which is an important reason why Yugoslavia was better: it didn’t force so many people with such a brutal force to decide to be either heroes (traitors) or cowards (system-compliant)…
Query from a curious outsider. Had the technology existed at the time would blogs such as this one have been permitted / tolerated in the old Yugoslavia or subjected to censorship?
Funny thing. When I first heard this a few days ago,I immediately wondered if you had been involved with the report, if only from a familiar outsider’s view of the situation. I kept on listening, thinking that your name would be mentioned. What happened? I thought for sure that your continuing YUgo Album Covers SPecial Reports would be discussed. Again, nothing. I e-mailed NPR telling them how they’d fallen down on the job and how they missed a golden opportunity for some humor.
Michael, I think this was your tipping point.
Plav trg: I (born in 1972) had many penfriends all around the world, I bought my very first Nick Cave (MC) in Slovenia, went to a U2 concert to Budapest in the 80ies etc. So individuals did have much freedom. Slovenian newspapers (Mladina, I think also Tribuna) were very often “put under pressure”, many of them were probably objects of (preemptive) self-censorship. I think we (= Yugoslavia) would have either been allowed to use a “censored version” of the Internet itself or the www would have been the end of the things as we knew them. A difficult question.
Good job, Amy Standen. As for Yugonostalgia - there is no sense in denying that some music and art and such things were really nice. It’s always fun to remember the good ol’ days. For me, Yugonostalgia is similar to camp. But whoever is actually truly longing for those times must be out of their freaking mind.
I covered it days ago, but I like the illustration you found!
Oh, of course it was great back then. People usually tend to supress the bad things, do they not? Why would one remember such things as lack of washing detergent, especially if you actually could go accross the border to Austria and bought some there. Along with monthly dose of coffee, chocolate and rice. Or driving on alternative days only and buying gasoline with coupons. Now it sounds as romantic as the light candels in the evening only if you forget the fact that they came in one package with drafty cold houses and in-curable diseases.
But still… I couldn’t find one particulary bad memory of my childhood
Cija, I itch to add some of the Unforgettables of Our Glorious Past:
- little work to do and sooo much time to mind other people’s business (favorite pastime)
- too much drinking
- obligatory pretensions: “We are a true, loving family” ” We still have values”, “We are better/the Chosen ones”, “It’s all about being (more) human”…
I don’t think this article is too accurate. I think it makes it sound like Slovenia on the whole is quite Yugonostalgic, but I don’t completely agree with that. Sure there are nice memories of the past (human nature there), plus most people were young back then, which makes their views on the matter even more positive. However, the article focuses on a group of people in the Slovenian society and makes a generalization that the whole society is like that. It states that this film, “Sretno dijete” was a big hit. To tell the truth, before I read the article I have never even heard of the movie, which I probably would had it been a “big hit” among the general public.
And the most interesting bit: The picture, probably added to emphasize how much Slovenia worships Tito, is from Sarajevo, which is obviously an integral part of Slovenia..
Just a few thoughts:
As far as Internet goes, “we” were taxed out of having good technologies (i.e. computers) in 1980s (unless EI NiÅ¡ is good), but BBS did flourish when the time was right (some exchange with global networks was going on too). We continued even syncing a couple of Croatian and Serbian BBS during early years of conflict.
Considering that we did have somewhat uptodate technology laws in 1980s, there wasn’t much censorship going on there anyway.
But, Yugonostalgia: Old people liked it when they were young, that’s easy.
Young people envy vast cultural land that Yugoslavia gave. Sure, it wasn’t all that good, but at least you weren’t confined to your small xenophobic village. Diversity is good, and we don’t have it any more. Balkanization ate it all up.
I don’t care about the country of my name, but I certainly do want to be able to go to Ljubljana or Zagreb without any hassle. Places different enough to be interesting, yet familiar enough not to make you a tourist.
I belong to the very old generation, and therefore can not be good example when we discuss Yugonostalgia, but I do wintess (maybe Sarajevo/Bosnia is not good example too?) around me many young people wanting to read, listen, watch things that stem from those old days. And I agree with serbianmess - in 70’s we could travel to Bled and Ohrid, Belgrade and Zagreb (now 15 years later… there is still no train between Sarajevo and Belgrade) but we could also travel abroad, read foreign newspapers, buy records etc. Those in Eastern Europe could not do that. To conclude, Yugonostalgia appeared first in Slovenia (one nation, no war) but is now present in other parts of former Yugoslavia. More and more so.
Consumer society is not the only thing human being needs.
Y*nostalgia is just a bunch of bullshit. I think getting back our independence in 1991 after more than a millennium of foreign rule was one of the best things to happen to us in the 20th century, but it’s just sad and “worryfying” what’s been happening lately. They’re trying to put this country back into the same pot we escaped from, be it via (”common”) media (MTV “Adria” comes to mind, as well as too many Serbo-Croatian TV stations available on our providers’ scheme — as opposed to the supply of other EU stations, etc.) or various corporate supply regions. Like there’s no EU at all.
I take it’s a franco-english conspiracy dating back to the end of WW1 to say the least…
As for me, if there’s any nostalgia I’m more of a habsburg-o-nostalgic — the days when these lands were part of one of the biggest powers on the surface of this planet. Must be a reminiscence of at least one of my previous lives.
Oh pleeease DJ, we can not take a helicopter and disappear from this area, Balcans will always be the neighbouring countries, no matter how hard you try to put a blind spot there. And sooner or later it will all be part of EU. Habsburgs?? Don’t make me laugh… You have a good expample of treatment of Slovenes in Carinthia, that’s how it must have looked then.
Just because you’re not in the yugonostalgia club you don’t have to be yugophobic either because of some yugo culture coming back. And seriously, I don’t think you will find three sane citizens of Slovenia who would be interested in renewing a union in any way, therefore your phobia is completely unfounded.
Talking about “difficult pronunciations”: hurry up and listen to this entertaining programme on the best British radio station, Radio 4. It’s last Sunday’s Food Programme about - of course - pražen krompir and sheer loopiness of the whole thing made me smile. It also made me slightly nostalgic for “that fat, white potatoes from the Lower Carniola” and the rest of Slovenia www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/foodprogramme.shtml
Maybe that’s the whole point about nostalgia: you can never be sure if one is being ironic or not.
Lots of great comments here.
And thanks for that wonderfully odd link, Tadej!
Re Cija:
The relations in Austria-Hungary were probably pretty much the same or at least similar to those in Yugoslavia, or for that matter the (future?) EU. Things went a lot worse after 1918 on all sides (one of the results also being, as you pointed out, the reactionary Haider’s policy about Slovenians in Carinthia).
Mind you that the south/east border of Slovenia is not something new, but rather one of the oldest borders in the Old World. It was namely also part of the SE border of the Holy Roman Empire, e.g.
www.uncp.edu/home/rwb/Holy_roman_Empire_Map1.jpg
As for “renewing a union in any way” — like I said, it’s already being done by selective media corporations as well as “corporate regions” (check your favorite products’ stickers for languages - they totally overlook the actual borders/unions).
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.